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> It seems to me that the design of a good cipher should be done totally in the open, so any vulnerabilities are inadvertent. This includes explaining the desi
by ethbro 9y ago
> It seems to me that the design of a good cipher should be done totally in the open, so any vulnerabilities are inadvertent. This includes explaining the design and the decisions and trade-offs that brought you there.
Implausible, considering that the mathematical attacks NSA is aware of but designing ciphers to be resistant to are still classified and currently being used by the NSA against older generation ciphers.
See history of differential cryptanalysis and DES design.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis
- throwaway2048 9y agoThis is speculation, based upon a time when the academic cryptoanalysis community was pretty much nonexistent. I find it exceedingly unlikely that the NSA is years ahead of public efforts on this front in 2017.
- compiler-guy 9y agoI find it plausible due to the asymmetry of information flow. Everything known by the public is also known by the NSA, but the NSA only tells the public what it wants them to know. That practically guarantees that there is a lot they know that we don't. Of course that proves nothing about this specific instance, and measuring "how far ahead" in years is hard, but I think it is likely the NSA has some extremely sophisticated techniques that we know nothing about.
- ethbro 9y agoThe devil's advocate to that is offered by tptacek in other thread: that NSA's efforts are simultaneously hurt by the fact they don't openly engage with the academic cryptography community. Whereas the public community is made stronger by its interactions.