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One of the weaknesses publicly identified was the potential of the algorithm to harbour a kleptographic backdoor advantageous to those that know the kleptographic backdoor—the United States government's National Security Agency NSA —and no-one else.
In , The New York Times reported that documents in their possession but never released to the public "appear to confirm" that the backdoor was real, and had been deliberately inserted by the NSA as part of the NSA's Bullrun decryption program.
The general cryptographic community was initially not aware of the potential backdoor, until Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson 's publication, or of Certicom 's Daniel R. Brown and Scott Vanstone's patent application describing the backdoor mechanism.
A mathematical security reduction proof can then prove that as long as the number theoretical problems are hard, the random number generator itself is secure. In many other standards, constants which are meant to be arbitrary are chosen by the nothing up my sleeve number principle, where the constants are derived from, for example, pi, in a way that leaves little room for adjustment.
Because the standard committee were aware of the potential for a backdoor, a way for an implementer to choose their own secure P and Q were included. The proof relied on the assumption that three problems were hard: The alleged NSA backdoor would allow the attacker to determine the internal state of the random number generator from looking at the output from a single round 32 bytes ; all future output of the random number generator can then easily be calculated, until the CSPRNG is reseeded with an external source of randomness.
Writing about the patent in , commentator Matthew Green describes the patent as a " passive aggressive " way of spiting NSA by publicizing the backdoor, while still criticizing everybody on the committee for not actually disabling the backdoor they obviously were aware of.
An elliptic curve random number generator avoids escrow keys by choosing a point Q on the elliptic curve as verifiably random. Intentional use of escrow keys can provide for back up functionality. The relationship between P and Q is used as an escrow key and stored by for a security domain. The administrator logs the output of the generator to reconstruct the random number with the escrow key. Preferably, this operation is done in addition to the preferred method of Figure 1 and 2, however, it will be appreciated that it may be performed as a primary measure for preventing a key escrow attack.
The benefit of truncation is that the list of R values associated with a single ECRNG output r is typically infeasible to search. For example, for a bit elliptic curve group, the number of potential points R in the list is about 2 80 , and searching the list would be about as hard as solving the discrete logarithm problem. The cost of this method is that the ECRNG is made half as efficient, because the output length is effectively halved.
According to John Kelsey, the option in the standard to choose a verifiably random Q was added as an option in response to the suspected backdoor, [15] though in such a way that FIPS validation could only be attained by using the possibly backdoored Q. Appendix C of the standard gives a loose argument that outputting less bits will make the output less uniformly distributed.
Brown writes in the conclusion: It was only after Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson 's presentation that the potential for a backdoor became widely known. It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. The OpenSSL developers were aware of the potential backdoor because of Shumow and Ferguson's presentation, and wanted to use the method included in the standard to choose a guarantied non-backdoored P and Q , but was told that to get FIPS validation they would have to use the default P and Q.
As far as I know, the alternatives do not admit a known feasible backdoor. Many implementations come from a renamed copy of a library implementation. The BlackBerry software is an example of non-default use. BlackBerry Ltd has however not issued an advisory to any of its customers who may have used it, because they do not consider the probable backdoor a vulnerability. In the case of the Cryptographic API, it is available if a 3rd party developer wished to use the functionality and explicitly designed and developed a system that requested the use of the API.
Bruce Schneier has pointed out that even if not enabled by default, having a backdoored CSPRNG implemented as an option can make it easier for NSA to spy on targets which have a software-controlled command-line switch to select the encryption algorithm, or a " registry " system, like most Microsoft products, such as Windows Vista:. A Trojan is really, really big. But changing a bit-one to a bit-two [in the registry to change the default random number generator on the machine] is probably going to be undetected.
It is a low conspiracy, highly deniable way of getting a backdoor. In December a proof of concept backdoor [39] was published that uses the leaked internal state to predict subsequent random numbers, an attack viable until the next reseed. Originally it was supposed to use a Q point chosen by Juniper which may or may not have been generated in provably safe way. This backdoor was then backdoored itself by an unknown party which changed the Q point and some test vectors.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer". Retrieved December 20, Retrieved 22 December Archived from the original on A few more notes on NSA random number generators". The New York Times. Retrieved September 11, Using Cryptography Against Cryptography".
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The design and implementation of protocol-based hidden key recovery. Young , Moti Yung Retrieved 12 September A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering. Requesting removal of CFRG co-chair]". Retrieved December 22, Retrieved 23 December Few at the Swiss factory knew the mysterious visitors were pulling off a stunning intelligence coup - perhaps the most audacious in the National Security Agency's long war on foreign codes - tribunedigital-baltimoresun".
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Young and Moti Yung present their cryptovirology paper "Kleptography: Using Cryptography Against Cryptography" at Eurocrypt The paper generalizes the paradigm used to attack Diffie—Hellman from Eurocrypt As a result, a way was specified for implementers to choose their own P and Q values.
Users will not notice the key recovery mechanism because the scheme is hidden. This does not leverage an elliptic curve discrete-log kleptogram and as a result requires a large-bandwidth subliminal channel to pull off. The paper also anticipates Shumow and Ferguson's announcement of a possible backdoor: The reason for this is more than just to make the proof work. Once the distinguisher gets the prestates, it can easily distinguish the output from random. Therefore, it is generally preferable for Q to be chosen randomly, relative to P.
Note that this is a separate problem from the backdoor. No proof of security e. Young and Yung publish a research paper detailing a provably secure asymmetric backdoor in SSL. The attack is an attack on SSL random number generation. Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson give an informal presentation demonstrating that an attacker with the backdoor and a small amount of output can completely recover the internal state of EC-DRBG, and therefore predict all future output.
One of the purposes of Bullrun is described as being " to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world. A presidential advisory committee set up to examine the NSA recommended that the US government "fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards" [11]. Coviello said RSA Security had seen decreasing revenue from encryption, and no longer wanted to expend resources driving encryption research, but as "contributor to and beneficiary of open standards" would trust NIST and NSA guidance, and blamed NSA for tricking the company.