NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

Re:NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It ... by tptacek on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @08:29PM (#8565334)

You and I mean different things by "crypto vulnerabilities". I took the parent comment to mean things like the RC4 biases; like I said, things for which the "fix" would involve entirely new algorithms or constructions. An example of this kind of NSA disclosure would be the DES s-boxes.

Crypto software implementation vulnerabilities are very common, but the kinds of things you're talking about are most often found in obscure and/or serverside software. Look at the tempo at which bugs like the NSS e=3 bug are released; it's like once or twice a year.

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Re:NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It ... by xnull on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @09:08PM (#8565442)

I think implementation bugs are within the spirit of OP, especially provided the NSA claims to have provided an implementation fix for Heartbleed.

The sorts of bugs I'm talking about exist in client and popular software. As far as tempo is concerned this year alone has given us BERserk, gotofail, Android Master Key, OpenSSL fork(), Bitcoin's use of P256, GNUTLS X.509 parsing bug, the OpenSSL compiler optimization+processor family randomness bug, and others.

If we were to entertain OP's point maybe there would be a faster tempo if the NSA were helping out. :)

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Re:NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It ... by tptacek on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @09:14PM (#8565450)

Sure, if this is what we mean by the kinds of cryptography bugs NSA is a powerhouse at, I'm sure they could be leaking more of them to industry.

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