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I remember when this first broke getting heavily downvoted for suggesting that RSA wasn't paid $10 million to create a backdoor for their customer's as everyone

I remember when this first broke getting heavily downvoted for suggesting that RSA wasn't paid $10 million to create a backdoor for their customer's as everyone was implying at the time. Rather, they (naively) were paid to joint develop a technology that would be a marketing dream "Hey this included help from the brightest minds at the NSA so why wouldn't you use it for your own organization?!" So I found this quote to be very interesting: "We could have been more sceptical of NSA's intentions," RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters. "We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure."

higherpurpose 13y ago
They took the money and then accepted NSA's "help".
hga 13y ago
"We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure." Which is true, and as examples we have SE Linux and apparently strengthening the S-boxes of DES against differential cryptanalysis, which had not yet been independantly discovered by public researchers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.2...). However, that was then; now, we legitimately trust the NSA a lot less, but I'm not sure we should blame RSA too much for not noticing the transition. I'd also note that I arrived at MIT a couple of years after RSA was first published, and I heard various rumors that there were rather intense sub rosa interactions between the team and the NSA et. al. in that period. With a good outcome, but threats were made etc.
- akira2501 13y ago
  I've brought up the S-Box strengthening several times before, but it's important to note that the NSA pushed IBM to reduce the key length in DES. IBM wanted 64 bits, NSA wanted 48, and we all got 56 as a compromise; not entirely egalitarian work.
  - marshray 13y ago
    What I've been told is that 56 bits is pretty close to its actual effective security in the presence of differential cryptanalysis. So the key length was 'right sized' and it ended up having truth-in-labeling after all.

higherpurpose 13y ago

They took the money and then accepted NSA's "help".

hga 13y ago

"We trusted them because they are charged with security for the U.S. government and U.S. critical infrastructure." Which is true, and as examples we have SE Linux and apparently strengthening the S-boxes of DES against differential cryptanalysis, which had not yet been independantly discovered by public researchers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.2...). However, that was then; now, we legitimately trust the NSA a lot less, but I'm not sure we should blame RSA too much for not noticing the transition. I'd also note that I arrived at MIT a couple of years after RSA was first published, and I heard various rumors that there were rather intense sub rosa interactions between the team and the NSA et. al. in that period. With a good outcome, but threats were made etc.

akira2501 13y ago
I've brought up the S-Box strengthening several times before, but it's important to note that the NSA pushed IBM to reduce the key length in DES. IBM wanted 64 bits, NSA wanted 48, and we all got 56 as a compromise; not entirely egalitarian work.
- marshray 13y ago
  What I've been told is that 56 bits is pretty close to its actual effective security in the presence of differential cryptanalysis. So the key length was 'right sized' and it ended up having truth-in-labeling after all.