Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2007

I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard. It makes no sense as a trap door: It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. And it makes no sense from a backwards-compatibility perspective: Swapping one random-number generator for another is easy.

Bruce Schneier

# 16th November 2007, 10:25 am / bruce-schneier, cryptography, dualecdrbg, nsa, randomnumbers, security