Silent Circle Moving Away From NIST Cipher Suites After NSA Revelations

Trailrunner7 writes "The first major domino to fall in the crypto world after the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden began was the decision by Lavabit, a secure email provider, to shut down in August rather than comply with a government order. Shortly thereafter, Silent Circle, another provider of secure email and other services, said it was discontinuing its Silent Mail offering, as well. Now, Silent Circle is going a step further, saying that it plans to replace the NIST-related cipher suites in its products with independently designed ones, not because the company distrusts NIST, but because its executives are worried about the NSA's influence on NIST's development of ciphers in the last couple of decades. Jon Callas, one of the founders of Silent Circle and a respected cryptographer, said Monday that the company has been watching all of the developments and revelations coming out of the NSA leaks and has come to the decision that it's in the best interest of the company and its customers to replace the AES cipher and the SHA-2 hash function and give customers other options. Those options, Callas said, will include non-NIST ciphers such as Twofish and Skein."

Comments

THIS IS A GREAT IDEA!

[CajunArson]

Please move to the most obscure and unreviewed encryption algorithms that you can, and do it as fast as possible. By no means should you ever use the exact same encryption standards that are approved for use for securing the big-bad-evil U.S. government's own top-secret data. Remember, the only cryptographic systems with any flaws are the ones that were developed by non-US citizens and reviewed in a public process that might have tangentially involved the NSA. Oh, and nobody, we mean nobody, else could ever weaken or backdoor a cryptographic algorithm.
        -- Your friends at the NSA ... uh .. I mean "anti-government hippy commune"