You make some interesting points, albeit in a rather confrontational style. >We've had the DUAL_EC scandal, for once, as an example of NSA backdoor which as fa

You make some interesting points, albeit in a rather confrontational style. >We've had the DUAL_EC scandal, for once, as an example of NSA backdoor which as far as was proved, only the NSA could crack. I am not a cryptographer but I understood this a little differently from the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG > proved that backdoors are not only possible... This is not disputed. What is disputed is that there is some safe way of doing it > but were going on behind our backs... A number of people outside of the NSA had identified the possibility of a backdoor. It seems some decided to overlook it or felt powerless to do anything. Indeed some others patented it, thereby making it public. Maybe the $10M grant affected some peoples judgement > only the NSA could crack If I understand correctly the flaw weakened the selection of key parameters in a way that made it easier to brute force, by dramatically reducing the possible start points. If another nation state had brought their resources to this, maybe they could have exploited it and, most likely, they wouldn't have made that public. Moreover the Juniper scandal (mentioned at the end of the same article which was rather convenient) suggests that a third party did indeed make use of this backdoor. > the real issue would be the scale and the distribution of access to the backdoor to various agencies. Which was a point discussed in the original article at some length