5 ms·

Not disagreeing with your take, but I think its important to note that I just don't see it being possible that Art came up with his take without any input from

by S_A_P 5y ago

Not disagreeing with your take, but I think its important to note that I just don't see it being possible that Art came up with his take without any input from folks in the company. I would imagine there were meetings where these talking points were constructed. Right?

tptacek 5y ago
I think it seems crazy now, but that's because we know a lot more about the practical applications of malicious RNGs; they aren't an abstract concern now. But they kind of were when the big debate was alleged to have happened at RSA. Also: I'm naturally going to sound like I'm defending RSA here, and I am not. I feel like --- I'll probably be proven wrong by this in time because we live in a fallen world --- no major company in the world would in 2021 swap out a crucial cryptographic component for one DOD was demanding while cryptographers were making noise about how janky it is. That should have been the standard in 2007 or whatever, too.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Just a quick thought: I think it wasn't that long before that NSA had warned against some other crypto that was widely thought to be safe and everyone later realized that it had been a good thing. Can it be that some people thought NSA were doing them a favour again?
  - tptacek 5y ago
    You're probably thinking of DES, which happened long before Dual EC (and long before many of the people working at RSA started their careers). But you can see that effect even today, for instance with NSA's "deprecation" of Suite B cryptography and the shade that cast over conventional elliptic curve cryptosystems. I don't think one can reasonably defend adoption of Dual EC as somehow hedging a bet that NSA had found vulnerabilities in trivial block-based CSPRNGs, though. I think that decision was essentially indefensible, even at the time it was made; it's just more clearly batshit now than it was then.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Ok, thanks. I appreciate your opinion on it and guess you are right.
- wahern 5y ago
  > I think it seems crazy now, but that's because we know a lot more about the practical applications of malicious RNGs; RNGs were understood to be the lynchpin of secure systems for decades, including long before 2007; and it was also widely assumed both now and then that they were one of the most common vectors for attack by the NSA. Why RSA added Dual_EC_DRBG is easy to explain in dollars & cents: 1) RSA was literally paid to add it, and 2) most of RSA's revenue comes, directly or indirectly, through government contracts (e.g. FIPS compliance, etc). As for why RSA insiders didn't speak up: there are mountains of scholarship explaining why people just keep their heads down. Even if you were absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dual_EC_DRBG was a backdoor, intelligent people are very good at rationalizing things. Anybody who has worked at a large company, including RSA, understands that your day-to-day work and the company's business is as a practical matter <10% technical and >90% everything else (sales, profit seeking, integration, etc, etc). More importantly, if you're a company doing business in a space dominated by U.S. government requirements and processes, or even just patriotic, the NSA having a backdoor is hardly the worse thing in the world. There are amazing cryptographers in China. Even the ones who fancy themselves world citizens and above the fray of nationalism, how many do you think would stick their head out were they in a position to identify possible formal government attempts to manipulate technology? Moreover, a backdoor doesn't necessarily mean insecure; it's not a categorical truth that any backdoor means broken security, that's just a rule of engineering thumb built on the experience that securely maintaining the keys to backdoors is supremely difficult, often more difficult than any other aspect. Nobody has yet come close to breaking Dual_EC_DRBG, AFAIU. From a purely technical perspective, Dual_EC_DRBG is still secure. The keys haven't leaked, and the algorithm remains as impenetrable as ever. At the end of the day, that's all the rationalization most people would ever need to keep their head down. The "security" of Dual_EC_DRBG is a socio-political debate, not a technical one.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I disagree with basically all of this. I disagree that cryptography engineers understood viscerally how good a target RNGs were or how viable a PKRNG would be (further evidence for that would be the contortions attackers have to go through to extract enough wire state from Dual EC to mount the most straightforward attacks). I think you can formulate an argument that any major cryptographic primitive is the "lynchpin", and indeed you see people doing that, for instance with the SIMON/SPECK block cipher designs --- block ciphers, after all, are the lynchpin of secure systems. I agree, obviously, that RSA added Dual EC because DOD demanded it. But most of RSA's revenue didn't come from BSAFE, or even things that relied on BSAFE. They were a crappy token company that bought RSA, then built a bunch of multi-factor authentication stuff that had more to do with IP reputation than with cryptography. I don't really buy that anybody working inside RSA was absolutely convinced that Dual EC was a backdoor. I sort of don't buy that anyone was really even seriously paying attention. I think people think of RSA as a cryptography company, but that is not at all what RSA was at the time this happened. None of this matters, really. We arrive at the same place about RSA's culpability. But if you came to HN hoping to find someone to stick up for RSA's decision here, you haven't been paying attention to the tenor of this place. All you're going to get here is hair splitting; that's the interesting conversation we can actually have. There's no viable debate about whether adopting Dual EC was defensible. Even when I was saying I doubted Dual EC was a backdoor, I still didn't think using it was defensible.

by S_A_P 5y ago

tptacek 5y ago

I think it seems crazy now, but that's because we know a lot more about the practical applications of malicious RNGs; they aren't an abstract concern now. But they kind of were when the big debate was alleged to have happened at RSA. Also: I'm naturally going to sound like I'm defending RSA here, and I am not. I feel like --- I'll probably be proven wrong by this in time because we live in a fallen world --- no major company in the world would in 2021 swap out a crucial cryptographic component for one DOD was demanding while cryptographers were making noise about how janky it is. That should have been the standard in 2007 or whatever, too.

skinkestek 5y ago
Just a quick thought: I think it wasn't that long before that NSA had warned against some other crypto that was widely thought to be safe and everyone later realized that it had been a good thing. Can it be that some people thought NSA were doing them a favour again?
- tptacek 5y ago
  You're probably thinking of DES, which happened long before Dual EC (and long before many of the people working at RSA started their careers). But you can see that effect even today, for instance with NSA's "deprecation" of Suite B cryptography and the shade that cast over conventional elliptic curve cryptosystems. I don't think one can reasonably defend adoption of Dual EC as somehow hedging a bet that NSA had found vulnerabilities in trivial block-based CSPRNGs, though. I think that decision was essentially indefensible, even at the time it was made; it's just more clearly batshit now than it was then.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Ok, thanks. I appreciate your opinion on it and guess you are right.
wahern 5y ago
> I think it seems crazy now, but that's because we know a lot more about the practical applications of malicious RNGs; RNGs were understood to be the lynchpin of secure systems for decades, including long before 2007; and it was also widely assumed both now and then that they were one of the most common vectors for attack by the NSA. Why RSA added Dual_EC_DRBG is easy to explain in dollars & cents: 1) RSA was literally paid to add it, and 2) most of RSA's revenue comes, directly or indirectly, through government contracts (e.g. FIPS compliance, etc). As for why RSA insiders didn't speak up: there are mountains of scholarship explaining why people just keep their heads down. Even if you were absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dual_EC_DRBG was a backdoor, intelligent people are very good at rationalizing things. Anybody who has worked at a large company, including RSA, understands that your day-to-day work and the company's business is as a practical matter <10% technical and >90% everything else (sales, profit seeking, integration, etc, etc). More importantly, if you're a company doing business in a space dominated by U.S. government requirements and processes, or even just patriotic, the NSA having a backdoor is hardly the worse thing in the world. There are amazing cryptographers in China. Even the ones who fancy themselves world citizens and above the fray of nationalism, how many do you think would stick their head out were they in a position to identify possible formal government attempts to manipulate technology? Moreover, a backdoor doesn't necessarily mean insecure; it's not a categorical truth that any backdoor means broken security, that's just a rule of engineering thumb built on the experience that securely maintaining the keys to backdoors is supremely difficult, often more difficult than any other aspect. Nobody has yet come close to breaking Dual_EC_DRBG, AFAIU. From a purely technical perspective, Dual_EC_DRBG is still secure. The keys haven't leaked, and the algorithm remains as impenetrable as ever. At the end of the day, that's all the rationalization most people would ever need to keep their head down. The "security" of Dual_EC_DRBG is a socio-political debate, not a technical one.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I disagree with basically all of this. I disagree that cryptography engineers understood viscerally how good a target RNGs were or how viable a PKRNG would be (further evidence for that would be the contortions attackers have to go through to extract enough wire state from Dual EC to mount the most straightforward attacks). I think you can formulate an argument that any major cryptographic primitive is the "lynchpin", and indeed you see people doing that, for instance with the SIMON/SPECK block cipher designs --- block ciphers, after all, are the lynchpin of secure systems. I agree, obviously, that RSA added Dual EC because DOD demanded it. But most of RSA's revenue didn't come from BSAFE, or even things that relied on BSAFE. They were a crappy token company that bought RSA, then built a bunch of multi-factor authentication stuff that had more to do with IP reputation than with cryptography. I don't really buy that anybody working inside RSA was absolutely convinced that Dual EC was a backdoor. I sort of don't buy that anyone was really even seriously paying attention. I think people think of RSA as a cryptography company, but that is not at all what RSA was at the time this happened. None of this matters, really. We arrive at the same place about RSA's culpability. But if you came to HN hoping to find someone to stick up for RSA's decision here, you haven't been paying attention to the tenor of this place. All you're going to get here is hair splitting; that's the interesting conversation we can actually have. There's no viable debate about whether adopting Dual EC was defensible. Even when I was saying I doubted Dual EC was a backdoor, I still didn't think using it was defensible.