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Questions tagged [nsa]

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the central producer and manager of signals intelligence for the United States Government.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the central producer and manager of signals intelligence for the United States Government. The NSA operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and reports to the Director of National Intelligence.

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Should we trust the NIST-recommended ECC parameters?

Recent articles in the media, based upon Snowden documents, have suggested that the NSA has actively tried to enable surveillance by embedding weaknesses in commercially-deployed technology -- including at least one NIST standard. The NIST FIPS…
D.W.
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Who uses Dual_EC_DRBG?

Recent news articles have suggested that the NSA may be involved in trying to influence the cryptography in public standards or commercially deployed software, to enable the NSA to decrypt the encrypted traffic. For example, see this article in the…
D.W.
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How can we reason about the cryptographic capabilities of code-breaking agencies like the NSA or GCHQ?

I have read in Applied Cryptography that the NSA is the largest hardware buyer and the largest mathematician employer in the world. How can we reason about the symmetric ciphers cryptanalysis capabilities of code-breaking agencies like the NSA or…
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Explaining weakness of Dual EC DRBG to wider audience?

I have an audience of senior (non-technical) executives and senior technical people who are taking the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG and considering it as a weakness of Elliptic curves in general. I can take a max of about 10 mins in my presentation to…
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Could RDRAND (Intel) compromise entropy?

I was recently discussing the issue of RDRAND in Intel chips and the whole issue about how NSA could potentially be influencing Intel to weaken or create backdoors in their design. This petition was posted asking Linus Torvalds to ignore RDRAND and…
Michael Aquilina
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Why is the P-521 elliptic curve not in Suite B if AES-256 is?

In the NSA's document, "The Case for Elliptic Curve Cryptography" (archived), we have +---------------+-------------------------+-----------------+ | Symmetric Key | RSA and Diffie-Hellman | Elliptic Curve | | Size (bits) | Key Size (bits)…
DeepSpace101
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How Far Ahead of Academia Are Government Agencies?

This is a soft question regarding comparisons between government security services (eg, NSA or GCHQ) and open-source research (e.g., academia). Hopefully it's on-topic for this site! In essence, my question is the following. How far ahead (if at…
Sam OT
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What NIST protocol was allegedly backdoored by NSA in 2006?

From a recent NY Times article: Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for…
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Does Microsoft use Dual_EC_DRBG by default?

So, as we all know, Dual_EC_DRBG contains an NSA back door. At this point, there is no reason to call it a "potential" or even an "alleged" back door; the presence is obvious even to the NY Times. As we also know, RSA BSAFE has been using…
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NSA removed EC-256 and SHA-256 from CNSA recently--should we be alarmed by this?

Recently, the NSA (re-published?) their CNSA guidelines and some information on post-quantum computers (per the title of the document). Here's the link for convenience (document is titled, 'Quantum Cryptography and Post-Quantum Computing' if you'd…
librehash
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What does NSA mean by 'Analyzable'?

Recently NSA published two new algorithms, Simon and Speck. In the abstract they say The aim of SIMON and SPECK is to fill the need for secure, flexible, and analyzable lightweight block ciphers. so as the question title says, what does…
rath
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Why does BCRYPT_RNG_DUAL_EC_ALGORITHM get removed from CNG API on Windows 10?

On article at => Microsoft Docs CNG Algorithm Identifiers I notice that BCRYPT_RNG_DUAL_EC_ALGORITHM is now removed since Windows 10. Beginning with Windows 10, the dual elliptic curve random number generator algorithm has been removed. Existing…
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What was the NSA's reasoning for making their bitwise combination functions in SHA-1 the way they did?

I know that these functions are there to actually make the program work. What I want to know is why they made the functions one way but not another. For example, why did they pick F1(B, C, D) = (B & C) | (~B & D) as their first function instead of…
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Who originally generated the elliptic curve now known as P256/secp256r1

Background: there is a theory going around that claims that P256 was backdoored by the NSA. The theory goes is that the NSA found a weakness that applies to a nontrivial fraction of elliptic curves (perhaps one in a thousand, perhaps one in a…
poncho
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What are the relations between cryptanalysis of block ciphers such as AES and Kendall's tau coefficient?

Studying AES on Wikipedia, I noticed a statement regarding some ongoing studies on the use of Kendall's Tau coefficient in cryptanalysis: According to the Snowden documents, the NSA is doing research on whether a cryptographic attack based on tau…
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