The NSA's Neuberger said this wasn't the first vulnerability the agency has reported to Microsoft, but it was the first one for which they accepted credit/attribution when MS asked.
Sources say this disclosure from NSA is planned to be the first of many as part of a new initiative at NSA dubbed "Turn a New Leaf," aimed at making more of the agency's vulnerability research available to major software vendors and ultimately to the public.
Snowden.
That'd be more of a communal-good, de-escalation approach. There's certainly something to be said for the fact that it displays the talent and expertise available too though (i.e. helping for recruitment).
Could be the knew about it for a while and had milked it hard until they caught someone else using it. Or like the parent said, previously discovered flaws meant that someone might catch this one, too.
"Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs. The system, called Dual Elliptic Curve, was a random number generator, but it had a deliberate flaw - or “back door” - that allowed the NSA to crack the encryption."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/excl...
That's not a flawed curve that NSA pushed; it's a much more straightforward cryptographic backdoor.
More like "do the actual job they are paid to do"
"The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (now referred to as cybersecurity) products and services, and enables computer network operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/nsa-launche...
It's actually a rather fascinating incongruity, since we live in a world where "the enemy" is more likely than not to be using the same software systems that the NSA themselves are, and that therefore any exploitable flaws they find in enemy systems are pretty likely to be just as exploitable in their own. (And that similarly, disclosing the flaw in order to fix the issue in their own systems is very likely to result in "the enemy" fixing the flaw as well.)
A couple years ago the White House released a document explaining the process they use for deciding what vulnerabilities they keep secret: https://www.cnet.com/news/white-house-trump-administration-h... noting that "In the vast majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest". Though from what we've seen in past leaks, it's pretty obvious they don't reach that conclusion for all vulnerabilities they find.
Mission Statement The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (now referred to as cybersecurity) products and services, and enables computer network operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.
IIRC, in earlier times the government didn't use as much COTS stuff, and civilian computer systems weren't so critical, so the roles were easier to separate. The NSA developed whole series of secret encryption algorithms for the exclusive use of the government/military, and civilian algorithms weren't approved to secure classified communications.
I guess it makes sense proponents of those changes would be ok of breaking it for the proles of they thought their secrets are protected.
What NSA needs are NOBUS ("nobody but us") backdoors. Dual_EC is a NOBUS backdoor because it relies on public key encryption, using a key that presumably only NSA possesses. Any of NSA's adversaries, in Russia or Israel or China or France, would have to fundamentally break ECDLP crypto to exploit the Dual_EC backdoor themselves.
Weak curves are not NOBUS backdoors. The "secret" is a scientific discovery, and every industrialized country has the resources needed to fund new cryptographic discoveries (and, of course, the more widely used a piece of weak cryptography is, the more likely it is that people will discover its weaknesses). This is why Menezes and Koblitz ruled out secret weaknesses in the NIST P-curves, despite the fact that their generation relies on a random number that we have to trust NSA about being truly random: if there was a vulnerability in specific curves NSA could roll the dice to generate, it would be prevalent enough to have been discovered by now.
Clearly, no implementation flaw in Windows could qualify as a NOBUS backdoor; many thousands of people can read the underlying code in Ghidra or IDA and find the bug, once they're motivated to look for it.
Of course I applaud responsible disclosure, and if they continue down that direction they have the possibility of rebuilding some of the trust they've broken in modern times.
> Clearly, no implementation flaw in Windows could qualify as a NOBUS backdoor; many thousands of people can read the underlying code in Ghidra or IDA and find the bug, once they're motivated to look for it.
The counter examples are the hordes of critical 0 days they've been sitting on, some of which have led to to a body count of five eyes citizens.
Like I said, disclosing is a step in the right direction, but they don't get a cookie for the first major disclosure in decades.
Should you trust them about Dual_EC? Obviously not: the sketchiness of Dual_EC has been clear since its publication (the only reason people doubted it was a backdoor was that it was too obviously a backdoor; I gave them way too much credit here).
Should you trust them about the NIST P-curves? That depends on who you ask, but the NOBUS analysis is very helpful here: you have to come up with a hypothetical attack that NSA can exploit but that nobody else can discover, otherwise NSA is making China and Russia's job easier for them. Whatever else you think about NSA, the idea that they're sanguine about China is an extraordinary claim.
Sounds like "we find so many critical bugs... we don't need all of them to achieve our goals, so let's blow some of them for PR"