NSA Turns To Commercial Software For Encryption

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to eWEEK, the National Security Agency (NSA) has picked a commercial solution for its encryption technology needs, instead on relying on its own proprietary code. "The National Security Agency has purchased a license for Certicom Corp.'s elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) system, and plans to make the technology a standard means of securing classified communications. In the case of the NSA deal, the agency wanted to use a 512-bit key for the ECC system. This is the equivalent of an RSA key of 15,360 bits." This summary includes the NIST guidelines for public key sizes and contains more details and links about the ECC technology. Since the announcement, Canadian Press reports that Certicom's shares more than doubled in Toronto."

Comments

Re:Privatization

[espo812]

Oh come on, I know Bush's administration is all for privatization and turning to the private sector and all, but this?

I believe that the technological divide between the NSA and the private sector has been shrinking over the years. I also don't think they would have selected this product if they didn't have good reason to. I suspect that this product was probably developed with some degree of NSA involvement, either contract work there or by former contractors/employees. And, low and behold, as I RTFA it says:

Certicom has worked with the NSA, based at Fort Meade, Md., on several classified projects in the past, and this agreement is essentially an outgrowth of that work, officials said.

So, it appears to have a lot of NSA involvement in the development. Actually, RTFAing a bit more closely it appears NSA is licensing the algorithm from Certicom. So they may not even be using the code from Certicom, they could be developing all the systems in house. Clearly, they wouldn't make a move like this without thoroughly analyzing the algorithms involved.

So what comes out is a solution that was produced much cheaper than a similar inhouse effort, and this will save the tax payers money (which sounds good to this poor college student.) I have to say I'm surprised at the Agency going after a commercial product for classified purposes, but I'm sure they have good reasons.

Re:What about license abuse?

[randyest]

The NSA practically can't not follow the license -- it's world-wide and allows granting sub-licenses, and is only restricted to use above a certain security level. The NSA would have to use relatively insecure implementations of the technology to violate the license, and I think that's unlikely:

Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC), a leading provider of wireless security solutions, today announced that the National Security Agency (NSA) in Maryland has purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's MQV-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) intellectual property. ECC is becoming a crucial technology for protecting national security information.

This agreement will give the NSA a nonexclusive, worldwide license with the right to grant sublicenses of MQV-based ECC covered by many of Certicom's US patents and applications and corresponding foreign rights in a limited field of use. The field of use is restricted to implementations of ECC that are over GF(p), where p is a prime greater than 2256. Outside the field of use, Certicom will retain all rights to the technology for other industries that require the same levels of security, including state and local government agencies. Certicom will continue its policy of making its intellectual property available to implementers of ECC under normal commercial terms on a non discriminatory basis.

Re:OSS ECC? ECC vs AES

[graf0z]

GnuPG can use DSA which is ECC.

No, DSA != ECC.

DSA and ECC both do encryption by exponentation, relying on the assumtion that the reverse function - the logarithm - is infeasible with the used keylengths. They are both called "Discrete Logarithm Systems".

But the multiplication is done in completly different mathematical contexts: DSA multiplies in the rings Z/p (that are the natural numbers modulo p, p being a prime) where ECC multiplies in suitable "elliptic curve groups over finite fields" . That are finite sets of "numbers" paired with an complicated operation called "multiplication". These "numbers" behave quiet odd.

The main practical difference is the neccessary keylength. Depending on the chosen eliptic curve, ECC keys are 4-8 times smaller than DSA keys. They get much closer to the "no attack is faster than the brute force attack"-paradigm than other public key algorithms like DSA or RSA.

Unfortunatly, huge classes of suitable elliptic curves got patented.

Google for free ECC software. There are at least some libraries published by academic research groups.

/graf0z.

Re:FUD

[quadelirus]

I stated this in another post, but I've got a link now:

The NSA is not lisencing software, it is lisencing the right to use Certicom's ECC cryptosystem. Cryptosystems now are usually known even when proprietary to allow mathematicians and cryptographers the ability to test the security of it. (The RSA cryptosystem for instance is thoroughly explained on RSA's web-site, but you would still need a lisence to use the algorithm in a program)

I found a tutorial by Certicom on their ECC cryptosystem here.

PS. I could be wrong, but from the article it seems that "intellectual property" and "This is the first time that the NSA has endorsed any sort of public-key cryptography system." that they are not actually lisencing software but are in fact lisencing the cryptosystem. If I am wrong, I humbly apologize.