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NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography Standard

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  NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography Standard Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-11-16 13:38 -0600
    Re: NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography Standard gilber34 <fafa@invalid.com> - 2015-11-16 14:13 -0600

#533574 — NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography Standard

NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography 
Standard
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nsa-nist-encryption-scandal/


> In the three months since Edward Snowden began his whistle-blowing
> campaign against the National Security Agency (NSA) the former
> government contractor has exposed the agency’s massive online
> eavesdropping efforts and attempts to circumvent encryption used to
> secure digital communications. The latest allegations indicate the
> NSA manipulated and weakened a cryptography standard the National
> Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had issued several years
> ago.
>
> As a result, NIST last week publicly discouraged tech companies from
> using that cryptographic approach and promised to give the public an
> opportunity to weigh in on a revised standard. The fix may not be all
> that difficult—the tainted part of the standard is a highly
> inefficient algorithm that security experts identified as a problem
> long ago. In fact, the biggest mystery, those experts say, is why the
> NSA thought any company or government agency would willingly use that
> particular algorithm to protect their data. “It certainly wasn’t
> inserted into the standard with the intention of making an efficient
> algorithm available to the community,” says Ari Juels, chief
> scientist of computer storage provider EMC’s RSA security division.
>
> The NIST Special Publication 800-90 cryptography standard includes
> four different algorithms—called “deterministic random bit
> generators,” or DRBGs—for encoding data. The algorithm included at
> the NSA’s behest—Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit
> Generation, or Dual_EC_DRBG—is vulnerable to tampering and could
> allow the agency to build in a so-called backdoor it could use to
> determine the values that the algorithm generated, essentially
> neutering its effectiveness to keep information secret, according to
> documents Snowden leaked to the New York Times, The Guardian and
> ProPublica.



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#533587

On 11/16/2015 1:38 PM, Sam Wormley wrote:
> NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography
> Standard


Why is email transmitted in the clear ?

Why are files remain not encrypted on your computer ?

          NSA

they have been doing this a long time, remember the big PGP fight about 
20 years ago ?

remember the DES key was cut back from 64 to 56 bits, by NSA ?



and   you can't use encryption without their permission.

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