Dual_EC_DRBG Backdoor: a Proof of Concept

New submitter Reliable Windmill sends this followup to the report that RSA took money from the NSA to use backdoored tech for random number generation in encryption software. From the article: "Dual_EC_DRBG is an pseudo-random number generator promoted by NIST in NIST SP 800-90A and created by NSA. This algorithm is problematic because it has been made mandatory by the FIPS norm (and should be implemented in every FIPS approved software) and some vendors even promoted this algorithm as first source of randomness in their applications. If you still believe Dual_EC_DRBG was not backdoored on purpose, please keep reading. ... It is quite obvious in light of the recent revelations from Snowden that this weakness was introduced by purpose by the NSA. It is very elegant and leaks its complete internal state in only 32 bytes of output, which is very impressive knowing it takes 32 bytes of input as a seed. It is obviously complete madness to use the reference implementation from NIST"

Comments

Re: Hmmm

[MobSwatter]

Business Intelligence, for the purpose of corporate espionage. You also have to take into consideration that the NSA does answer to someone, and that someone was corporate sponsored before they were even put on a ballot to be voted on. They were put up to this, and continuance of the program likely has little to do with terrorism as the program has proven fruitless even after intelligence information was given about events prior to them being given/developing these tools but they in fact failed to respond accordingly to prevent them, this includes 9/11.

Re:Another view on teh RSA / NSA thing...

[WaywardGeek]

The crypto email list discussed this at length. People chimed in who remember when this happened. Here's my take away: EMC had just bought RSA, and was looking for profits, and many of the best and brightest at RSA had left. The NSA offered $10M to make their RNG the default in BSAFE, and no one at RSA could offer EMC management any compelling argument as to why they should not take the money. RSA issued a press release about it. There was no secrecy. Competitors thought it was foolish to take money from the NSA, and at the same time wondered how they could get onto this gravy train.

This is a case of typical incompetence. The response RSA published is slimy lawyer crapola. The lawyer sucks as bad as the incompetent EMC management. The good news is that there was no secret deal that RSA agreed to with the NSA to compromise all our security. The NSA did their job well. RSA didn't. I'll just point out that only crypto ignoramuses would accept closed-source un-auditable stuff from anyone when it comes to encryption, IMO. Money corrupts this industry.