NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought – study

 

RANDOM NUMBERS

 

Cryptography experts have long been suspicious of Dual Elliptic Curve, but the National Institute of Standards and Technology and RSA only renounced the technology after Snowden leaked documents about the back door last year.

 

That was also when the academic team set out to see if they could break Dual Elliptic Curve by replacing two government-issued points on the curve with their own. The team published a summary of their study online on Monday (www.dualec.org)

 

and plan to present their full findings at a conference this summer.

 

Random numbers are used to generate cryptographic keys – if you can guess the numbers, you can break the security of the keys. While no random number generator is perfect, some generators were viewed as more predictable than others.

 

In a Pentagon-funded paper in 2008, the Extended Random protocol was touted as a way to boost the randomness of the numbers generated by the Dual Elliptic Curve.

 

But members of the academic team said they saw little improvement, while the extra data transmitted by Extended Random before a secure connection begins made predicting the following secure numbers dramatically easier.

 

“Adding it doesn’t seem to provide any security benefits that we can figure out,” said one of the authors of the study, Thomas Ristenpart of the University of Wisconsin.

 

Johns Hopkins Professor Matthew Green said it was hard to take the official explanation for Extended Random at face value, especially since it appeared soon after Dual Elliptic Curve’s acceptance as a U.S. standard.

 

“If using Dual Elliptic Curve is like playing with matches, then adding Extended Random is like dousing yourself with gasoline,” Green said.

 

The NSA played a significant role in the origins of Extended Random. The authors of the 2008 paper on the protocol were Margaret Salter, technical director of the NSA’s defensive Information Assurance Directorate, and an outside expert named Eric Rescorla.

 

Rescorla, who has advocated greater encryption of all Web traffic, works for Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser. He and Mozilla declined to comment. Salter did not respond to requests for comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *