Re: US Congress already discussing bans on strong crypto

From: Michael Richards (michael@fastmail.ca)
Date: 09/18/01 

To: kris@obsecurity.org
From: "Michael Richards" <michael@fastmail.ca>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 23:17:18 -0400 (EDT)

Your sediments echo mine about RSA and peer review. They can't really
stuff the RSA cat back into the bag. As for the change NSA did make
to the DES, I was not at all aware of this. I always assumed they had
weakened it. When did this info become public knowledge?

-Michael

[chop chop chop]
> There's nowhere to put a "backdoor" in the RSA algorithm. There's
> room to put a backdoor in the DES algorithm, and in fact when the
> DES algorithm was under consideration back in the early 70's the
> NSA did request a change to the "S-Boxes" of the candidate
> algorithm submitted by IBM which was eventually accepted. This
> change may have seemed suspicious, until a number of years later
> when civilian cryptographers discovered the technique of
> differential cryptanalysis and realised that the NSA's changes
> were to improve the resilience of DES against that attack, which
> they evidently already knew about.
[chop chop chop]
_________________________________________________________________
     http://fastmail.ca/ - Fast Free Web Email for Canadians

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message