Re:Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer
by bri3d on Friday December 20, 2013 @07:11PM
(#6945032)
Lucky Green, who appears to have had inside knowledge of this deal based on this mailing list post from September, seems to disagree that this was a good investment:
"This was $10M wasted. While this vendor may have had a dominating position in the market place before certain patents expired, by the time DoD/NSA paid the $10M, few customers used that vendor's cryptographic libraries.
There is no reason to believe that the $250M per year that I have seen quoted as used to backdoor commercial cryptographic software is spent to any meaningful effect."
Interestingly the mailing list post doesn't seem to mention the use of RSA's adoption as a factor in the NIST standard, so it's possible that while their knowledge was more advanced than the public's they didn't know about that side-effect.
http://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2013-Septe...
The particularly relevant portion is this:
"This was $10M wasted. While this vendor may have had a dominating position in the market place before certain patents expired, by the time DoD/NSA paid the $10M, few customers used that vendor's cryptographic libraries.
There is no reason to believe that the $250M per year that I have seen quoted as used to backdoor commercial cryptographic software is spent to any meaningful effect."
Interestingly the mailing list post doesn't seem to mention the use of RSA's adoption as a factor in the NIST standard, so it's possible that while their knowledge was more advanced than the public's they didn't know about that side-effect.