Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details on hackers and U.S. role

Re:Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details o... by JamesNay on Sunday September 05, 2021 @02:48PM (#28426682)

Bloomberg at the frontline of "having no idea how anything works at all".

When the NSA designed DEC, they primed it with constants, that you'd need to know to break the encryption with low effort.

Somebody discovered that and made it known publicly.

So now before the rumors evolve into actual security engineers looking into it, the NSA creates a scapegoat APT, that "altered" some "code" at Juniper.

Of course nobody finds out, who those APT are, because attribution is 1% more accurate than astrology.

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Re:Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details o... by tomerv on Sunday September 05, 2021 @03:08PM (#28426858)

I lost you at the second paragraph. Crypto researches generally agree today that the NSA actually chose strong contents for DES (I assume that's what you meant by DEC?). They invented differential cryptanalysis a decade before anyone else, and used that to strengthen the cypher. Everyone suspected their motives at the time, but eventually academy caught up with the knowledge the NSA had, and could show that the constants are in fact good.

Too bad they're doing the opposite of that nowadays...

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Re:Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details o... by ragona on Sunday September 05, 2021 @03:15PM (#28426915)

The GP is talking about Dual EC (the infamous algorithm in question) and abbreviating it DEC.

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Re:Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details o... by hjamesd on Sunday September 05, 2021 @03:25PM (#28426998)

Indeed, like this one

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

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