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Ask Slashdot: Can We Still Trust FIPS?

Posted by timothy on from the just-slide-it-under-my-door dept.

First time accepted submitter someSnarkyBastard writes "It has already been widely reported that the NSA has subverted several major encryption standards but I have not seen any mention of how this affects the FIPS 140-2 standard. Can we still trust these cyphers? They have been cleared for use by the US Government for Top-Secret clearance documents; surely the government wouldn't backdoor itself right?...Right?"

2 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can anyone trust by Entropius · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's not their only purpose. The NSA is supposed to:

    1) Make sure the bad guys don't snoop on Americans;
    2) Snoop on the bad guys.

    I use "bad guys" here with intentional irony, since nobody quite knows how to resolve the dichotomy that happens when the NSA's suspected of being bad guys.

  2. ASCII probably contains a NSA backdoor as well. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". Since this is an American standard, then the whole encoding scheme probably contains a backdoor that allows the NSA to read all information encoded in it. We can't trust EBDIC either as IBM is a contractor for the NSA, they would insert a backdoor as well. I think for maximum online privacy we should be using Unicode which shouldn't contain an NSA backdoor because it is an international standard. The American government has no interest in following or creating international standards.

    Unfortunately Slashdot does not support Unicode, so one should now safely assume that Slashdot is an NSA honeypot .