[kosasbest]

NSA are purple team (both red team and blue team), so they do defense aswell as offense. They need to sniff plaintext aswell as protect their own infra and IP with strong crypto standards like AES. The public also benefits from AES, often to the detriment of SIGINT efforts by the NSA, so there are caveats to this, and it's nuanced.

[keepamovin]

You really think they're using AES internally? Surely they're using classified ciphers.

[Alpha3031]

Suite A is fairly specialised. Nobody can publicly comment on specific use cases of course, but it's fairly well known that Suite B is used for most national security information, including TS/SCI. But yes, technically non-public algorithms exist and are in use, it's just not even nearly automatically applied to everything.

[keepamovin]

Cool! It would be fascinating to read more about the Suite A ciphers and compare them to known designs, see how they were inspired by, improved or differ. But I guess there's not much chance of that happening as they're classified, haha! :)

[halJordan]

They're using fips like the rest of govt. i get that you don't know. That's fine, but when you start making up stuff to fill in the gap that's when you need to do a reality check.

[keepamovin]

Oh, I don't know. I seem to see it ok. How about you? Didn't you miss that they're using classified?