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Something that was always fishy...Something that was always fishy...Posted Aug 18, 2004 22:56 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: Something that was always fishy... by gproux Parent article: Crypto researchers abuzz over flaws (News.com)
On the contrary; the NSA's mission includes having the technology the government uses be secure. It probably also includes securing the nation's critical civilian infrastructure. If the NSA know about a flaw in a standard encryption component, they would immediately work on a replacement and tell people to use that. When IBM initially proposed DES, the NSA told them to change some things, which turned out to protect against an attack unknown to the cryptography community at the time.
The reason is that there have always been spies and double agents. If the USSR could get atomic secrets back then, Al Queda could get cryptography secrets today, and could destroy US finance. The only solution is to make sure that there are no such secrets.
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Something that was always fishy... Posted Aug 19, 2004 6:12 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Are you smoking crack? The spooks specifically demanded that DES be weakened by reducing its key size to only 56 bits.
Something that was always fishy... Posted Aug 19, 2004 7:30 UTC (Thu) by barryn (subscriber, #5996) [Link] No, (s)he isn't smoking crack. While the NSA shortened the key length, they also changed DES to be resistant to differential cryptanalysis, well over a decade before differential cryptanalysis was discovered by anybody in the general public. (BTW, differential cryptanalysis is the basis of the attacks now being conducted against all these hash functions.)
Look at this Wikipedia article, particularly the "NSA's involvement in the design" section:
Something that was always fishy... Posted Aug 19, 2004 15:10 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] NSA wanted the shorter key length so that error-correction bits could be added. They didn't expect DES to be made public, from my understanding, and were somewhat upset when NBS released the DES specification.
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