Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 407
Backdoors do not care about standards. They are applied to implementations. Although AES has not been proven to be mathematically hard to break, so far it seems good. But if the NSA wanted a backdoor into AES, it certainly wouldnt go in the standards section. It would just join the open source group on a AES implementation and then provide useful updates and bug fixes while also introducing a new vulnerability. This scenario is entirely plausible as I see this happen all the time during the regular course of application development in business. Programmers mean to fix things and do so, but in the meantime it produces some unexpected consequence. Often times the problem with the changes are not discovered until well after the code has been verified by multiple programmers and put into usage.
The question of whether NSA has a mathematical solution to reversing the AES process in linear time is probably: NO.
But the question of whether NSA could place a backdoor into some software implementations of AES if they wanted to is most likely: YES.
Who knows whether the NSA wants to backdoor AES anyways. Because all they need is a passphrase to access the data directly and in linear time. I think the most direct attack route would be keyloggers. If I wanted to keep my data out of reach from NSA, I would be more concerned about the software running in the background and the hardware Im using while I type my passphrase into the computer.