[Cryptography] NSA versus DES etc....

Russ Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Mon Sep 29 02:34:12 EDT 2014


Richard Outerbridge writes:
 > On 2014-09-24 (267), at 02:09:17, John Denker <jsd at av8n.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > The entirely foreseeable result of putting out a
 > > weakened cipher standard was that friends would use
 > > the weakened version and enemies would very rapidly
 > > come up with a non-weakened version.
 > 
 > Y'know, I really don't believe the NSA have ever been
 > that dumb.

Why not? All of corporate America is that dumb. Corporate America has
all the incentives in the world to make money, while the NSA has the
usual bureaucratic (weaker) incentives.

Every corporate leader who says "I will protect my IP by taking steps
which make it harder to use" is indulging in this error. Why should
the NSA be any different?

http://www.crynwr.com/on-being-proprietary.html

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