> … actively used by the NSA … So the NSA would purposefully embed an exploitable bug in a cipher they themselves use? > … it would be about compromising secu

> … actively used by the NSA … So the NSA would purposefully embed an exploitable bug in a cipher they themselves use? > … it would be about compromising security on the software level rather than the encryption level Those are two very different things. A cipher could very well be exploitable. What you are talking about is the implementation. In other words, a vulnerable cipher would be exploitable regardless of the implementation. It is not the case, though. They tried to deploy their own protocol on top of a well known cipher.