Green: On the Juniper backdoor
Green: On the Juniper backdoor
Here's an
interesting article from cryptographer Matthew Green on how the Juniper
backdoor is the least interesting part of this whole episode. "Thus
Dual EC is safe only if you assume no tiny bug in the code could
accidentally leak out 30 bytes or so of raw Dual EC output. If it did, this
would make all subsequent seeding calls predictable, and thus render all
numbers generated by the system predictable. In general, this would spell
doom for the confidentiality of VPN connections. And unbelievably,
amazingly, who coulda thunk it, it appears that such a bug does exist in
many versions of ScreenOS, dating to both before and after the
'unauthorized code' noted by Juniper.
"