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Mathematicians’ role in flawed security cryptography

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We get such good stories from skeptical mathematician Peter Woit’s blog Not Even Wrong (he is an actual skeptic, not a poseur). Here is one:

Among the many disturbing aspects of the behavior of the NSA revealed by the Snowden documents, the most controversial one directly relevant to mathematicians was the story of the NSA’s involvement in a flawed NIST cryptography standard (for more see here and here). The New York Times reported:

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

The standard was based on the mathematics of elliptic curves, so this is a clearly identifiable case where mathematicians seem to have been involved in using their expertise to subvert the group tasked with producing high quality cryptography. A big question this raises has been what the NIST will do about this. In April they removed the dubious algorithm from their standards, and published the public comments (many of which were highly critical) on a draft statement about their development process. More.

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