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

Re:Compromised hardware

[Thanshin]

IMHO at this point we have to assume the hardware is compromised at some level. Not necessarily a backdoor but the hardware random number generator might not be that random.

We also have to assume that the power sockets are compromised. All computers that are, or have been at any point, attached to any source of power not directly coming from the sun must be considered infected, and shot in the brain.

Re:Compromised hardware

[TheCarp]

Looks like we have ourselves a plant! You think we don't know that tinfoil hats actually help to strengthen the orbital mind control signal? You aren't fooling slashdot that easily AC. Don't think we haven't been watching you, your comments have not gone unnoticed in this community Agent Coward

Re:Compromised hardware

[PopeRatzo]

Of course tinfoil hats are worthless. Everyone knows that the only thing you can put on your head to protect you from the NSA are the plastic bags you get from the dry cleaners.

Re:Compromised hardware

[flyingfsck]

Only an organically reared Armadillo hat can beat the Feds.