Questions tagged [nsa]
The National Security Agency (NSA) is the central producer and manager of signals intelligence for the United States Government.
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Speculative Question on NSA total storage capacity
This is a speculative question that may be hard to answer reliably. Apologies.
According to a Techcrunch article linked here
A stunning report in Forbes today detailed that the NSA’s rapidly ...
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NSA appears to be fond of data-dependent rotations
The NSA appears to have chosen RC6 for securing the communication channels for its spyware[1].
I have found the choice curious as the cipher has become somewhat obscure after AES was chosen and it ...
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Has anyone solved the NSA Puzzle from 2021? From their SOS VO puzzle page? [closed]
This is my first venture onto Cryptography SE, so I am not sure if this is even the appropriate place to ask for help for a relatively simple, amateur puzzle meant just for fun, but....
I have a copy ...
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Who originally generated the elliptic curve now known as P256/secp256r1
Background: there is a theory going around that claims that P256 was backdoored by the NSA. The theory goes is that the NSA found a weakness that applies to a nontrivial fraction of elliptic curves (...
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What’s the relationship between P-256 and Dual EC DRBG?
It is said that Dual EC DRBG has a backdoor given the values of the curve. Hence some people do not trust it.
With that in mind, some people also distrust NIST P-256 Curve. Why? Is it purely because ...
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What are the concrete changes the NSA did to the algorithm before DES was published?
It's common knowledge that the NSA, before publication of DES, tweaked the algorithm to improve its resistance against differential cryptanalysis. Schneier writes some of this on his blog, for example ...
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What is required to use a cryptographic algorithm backdoor?
David Wong in his book Real-World Cryptography writes:
In 2013, following revelations from Edward Snowden, it was discovered that NSA
had purposefully and successfully pushed for the inclusion of ...
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NSA removed EC-256 and SHA-256 from CNSA recently--should we be alarmed by this?
Recently, the NSA (re-published?) their CNSA guidelines and some information on post-quantum computers (per the title of the document).
Here's the link for convenience (document is titled, 'Quantum ...
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Security of RSA-3072 with public exponent $2^{16}+1$
NSA recommendation for the pre-quantum period allows the use of RSA-3072 (https://apps.nsa.gov/iaarchive/programs/iad-initiatives/cnsa-suite.cfm), nevertheless, is it safe enough to do it with the ...
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Why did the NSA create SHA?
New to cryptography, I'm trying to learn the program Veracrypt, and I'm now trying to understand the history of hash functions and how it applies to Veracrypt.
So this is what I understand so far, the ...
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Is it true that AES initialization constants, which are supposed to be random numbers, were in fact chosen by the NSA?
Is it true that AES initialization constants, which are supposed to be random numbers, were in fact chosen by the NSA?
I mean, it's said it was done before algorithm standardization when it was still ...
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Why does BCRYPT_RNG_DUAL_EC_ALGORITHM get removed from CNG API on Windows 10?
On article at => Microsoft Docs
CNG Algorithm Identifiers
I notice that BCRYPT_RNG_DUAL_EC_ALGORITHM is now removed since Windows 10.
Beginning with Windows 10, ...
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Aside from DES, has the NSA ever strengthened algorithms?
When DES was originally developed, the NSA changed the s-boxes. For decades, people thought that their changes introduced a backdoor, but then it was discovered that their changes actually ...
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What are the relations between cryptanalysis of block ciphers such as AES and Kendall's tau coefficient?
Studying AES on Wikipedia, I noticed a statement regarding some ongoing studies on the use of Kendall's Tau coefficient in cryptanalysis:
According to the Snowden documents, the NSA is doing ...
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How Far Ahead of Academia Are Government Agencies? [closed]
This is a soft question regarding comparisons between government security services (eg, NSA or GCHQ) and open-source research (e.g., academia). Hopefully it's on-topic for this site!
In essence, my ...
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