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To: zax who wrote (26470)	7/10/2013 8:34:33 AM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32692

The head of the Linux Foundation has read the code and said there is no "obvious" backdoor. NO OBVIOUS BACKDOOR. If the head of the Linux Foundation can't tell, I sure won't be able to. Here is one of the NSA's more famous backdoors in the name of "enhanced security". schneier.com It's only when you look under the hood at the NSA's contribution that questions arise. Problems with Dual_EC_DRBG were first described in early 2006. The math is complicated, but the general point is that the random numbers it produces have a small bias. The problem isn't large enough to make the algorithm unusable -- and Appendix E of the NIST standard describes an optional work-around to avoid the issue -- but it's cause for concern. Cryptographers are a conservative bunch: We don't like to use algorithms that have even a whiff of a problem. But today there's an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor.