Submission + - Given Recent Crypto Revelations, 'Everything is Suspect' (threatpost.com)
Gunkerty Jeb writes: So now that RSA Security has urged developers to back away from the table and stop using the maligned Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation (Dual EC DRBG) algorithm, the question begging to be asked is why did RSA use it in the first place?
Going back to 2007 and a seminal presentation at the CRYPTO conference by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, there have been suspicions about Dual EC DRBG primarily because it was backed by the National Security Agency, which initially proposed the algorithm as a standard. Cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote in a 2007 essay that the algorithm contains a weakness that “can only be described as a backdoor.”
“I wrote about it in 2007 and said it was suspect. I didn’t like it back then because it was from the government,” Schneier told Threatpost today. “It was designed so that it could contain a backdoor. Back then I was suspicious, now I’m terrified.
Going back to 2007 and a seminal presentation at the CRYPTO conference by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, there have been suspicions about Dual EC DRBG primarily because it was backed by the National Security Agency, which initially proposed the algorithm as a standard. Cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote in a 2007 essay that the algorithm contains a weakness that “can only be described as a backdoor.”
“I wrote about it in 2007 and said it was suspect. I didn’t like it back then because it was from the government,” Schneier told Threatpost today. “It was designed so that it could contain a backdoor. Back then I was suspicious, now I’m terrified.
