Topic: SECURITY - on December 23, 2013 at 2:46:00 PM CET
RSA comes out swinging, denies taking NSA's $10m to backdoor its crypto
RSA has hit back at allegations stemming from Edward Snowden's latest whistleblowing – specifically, the claim that it secretly took US$10m from the NSA in exchange for using the deliberately knackered Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) in its encryption products.
The EMC-owned security outfit said it started using Dual EC DRBG by default in 2004, sometime before the generator was standardised. By 2007 the algorithm was found to effectively have a backdoor in it that weakened the strength of any encryption that relied on it, making life easier for snoops. In September 2013, RSA told its customers to stop using the algorithm.
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