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by mashedvikings
2989 days ago
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One of the greatest heroes we have to thank are Diffie and Hellman who put up a fight when US government went against their research on public key cryptography. But I suppose the reason NSA was delaying was they had to develop a workaround for the encryption. Remember, while public key crypto got strong in 1996 when the key lengths ended Tailored Access Operations (NSA's hacking team) was created in 1998, before DES was replaced with AES in 2001. Now obviously it's not that simple. Phasing out weak standards has taken very long. Personally, I would love to understand what goes on in the heads of developers who still use age old primitives like MD5 and RSA-1280 (iMessage). |
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No. Their primary purpose was never to protect anybody else but their own operations (the concept "Nobody but us" is older and broader than Wikipedia currently knows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS ) especially not "common citizens". The NSA is mainly a military institution. Had they been able to get by with nobody being allowed to use crypto but they, they would have done that and continue doing.
Bonus: this is directly from the NSA:
https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/digital-media-center/...
Covered here:
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/cryptokids-nsa-foia/