4 ms·

The tweet* from the call with reporters - a cynical person might think instead that NSA thought that with the similarity to the LE and FF flaws it was not much

• blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Didn't the FBI or NSA push for flawed Elliptical Curve Crypto in the past? Could be the knew about it for a while and had milked it hard until they caught someone else using it. Or like the parent said, previously discovered flaws meant that someone might catch this one, too.
  • mzs 7y ago
    There is no evidence that US push flawed curves.
    • alasdair_ 7y ago
      >There is no evidence that US push flawed curves. "Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs. The system, called Dual Elliptic Curve, was a random number generator, but it had a deliberate flaw - or “back door” - that allowed the NSA to crack the encryption." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/exclusive-nsa-infiltrated-rsa-security-more-deeply-than-thought-study-idUSBREA2U0TY20140331 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/excl...
      • mzs 7y ago
        "random number generator"
      • tptacek 7y ago
        "Dual Elliptic Curve" is an RNG, a PKRNG, that works by using a public key to encrypt its state, which is then directly revealed (as public key ciphertext) to callers (for instance: in the TLS random blob). The problem with PKRNGs has nothing to do with elliptic curves; you could design one with RSA as well. The problem is that for a given public key, there's also a private key, and if you have that private key you can "decrypt" the random value to reveal the RNG's state. That's not a flawed curve that NSA pushed; it's a much more straightforward cryptographic backdoor.
  • andromeduck 7y ago
    It was Dual EC DRBG, a prng