3 ms·
Two NSA issues are getting conflated: (1) Keeping the key size within brute-forcing range. Agreed, they did that and surely wittingly. By the mid-90s nobody do
by thombat 7y ago
Two NSA issues are getting conflated:
(1) Keeping the key size within brute-forcing range. Agreed, they did that and surely wittingly. By the mid-90s nobody doubted they had the computational strength for it; the 1998 demonstration was that any modestly-funded organisation could too.
(2) Improving the resistance to differential analysis by changing the S-boxes. This is what the Schneier quote is about: the NSA making a change and refusing to disclose the basis, causing suspicion that this installed a backdoor for them, whereas in fact it was (as far as any public cryptographer has disclosed) strengthening it against a cryptanalytic technique that the NSA didn't want to reveal.