[Cryptography] NSA versus DES etc.... was: iOS 8

[Peter Gutmann]

Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> writes:

>so it's unclear what this "more sophisticated algorithm" was.

I don't know about a single algorithm but one attempt was to provide black
boxes under the CCEP that accepted a key and plaintext/ciphertext and spat out
ciphertext/plaintext.  The CCEP gear would be non-exportable, thus solving the
DES problem where either US banks/corporates could export it or you could buy
foreign gear built to the publicly-available design.  Since it never survived
into production several aspects of it were rather unclear, but it looked like
the NSA would be a middleperson in the key management process.

Peter.