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Mathematician warns NSA may be weakening next-gen encryption (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Mathematician warns NSA may be weakening next-gen encryption::Quantum computers may soon be able to crack encryption methods in use today, so plans are already under way to replace them with new, secure algorithms. Now it seems the US National Security Agency may be undermining that process

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 31 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And who is surprised by this? This is basically the NSA doing their job, nothing else.

[–] Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev 22 points 9 months ago

We're not surprised but we do need to mention this, discuss this, people need to be aware. You won't see much of this in mainstream media except: "And here's why the end of encryption might be a good thing...".

[–] frezik@midwest.social 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sort of. They've worked in mysterious ways over the years. They fucked with DES back in the day (specifically, the S-Boxes, which are big tables of data used during calculations), but evidence since then suggests that they actually improved it. However, they also seem to be responsible for keeping the key length short, which meant it was inevitable that computers would eventually be fast enough to break it (which it was by the mid to late 90s).

The NSA has a dual job. They want to break encryption, but they also need to protect US secrets. Since industrial espionage is a thing, that extends to protecting the secrets of private sector companies. So they sometimes want to improve encryption, and sometimes want to put in backdoors. If you call up someone in the NSA, there's no guarantee the person your talking to will be on your side or not.

Fortunately, cryptography in the public space has advanced substantially since DES was invented.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

They fucked with DES back in the day

Yep. I remember. IBM thought they had something new and BIG, and then came the NSA and just substituted some S-Boxes without comment. And boom, the key space got smaller.

The NSA has a dual job. They want to break encryption, but they also need to protect US secrets.

For them it is sufficient when they can happily read along.