Re:NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit aga...
by hovav on Saturday August 06, 2022 @12:08PM
(#32369278)
I don't think Juniper used BSAFE in ScreenOS -- they seem to have put together their own Dual EC implementation on top of OpenSSL, sometime around 2008. (This doesn't change your point, of course.)
Re:NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit aga...
by tptacek on Saturday August 06, 2022 @12:14PM
(#32369323)
Yeah, I think you're right; the Juniper revelation also happened months after the BULLRUN stuff --- I remember being upset about how Greenwald and his crew had hidden all the Snowden docs in a SCIF to "carefully review them", with the net result that we went many months without knowing that one of the most popular VPN appliances was backdoored.
Everybody who claimed Dual EC was a backdoor was right, and that backdoor was materially relevant to our industry. I couldn't believe something as dumb as Dual EC was a real backdoor; it seemed like such idiotic tradecraft. But the belief that Dual EC was so bad as tradecraft that it couldn't be real was, apparently, part of the tradecraft! Bernstein is right about that (even if he came to the conclusion at basically the same time as everyone else --- like, the instant you find out Juniper/Netscreen is using Dual EC, the jig is up).