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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> We achieve this by making encryption easy, powerful and ubiquitous

Ubiquitous encryption will be pointless if the encryption itself is subverted, like it was for 50 years with the 2 leading Swiss encryption vendors. I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel, and the next-best targets would be "enclaves", then back-dooring the algorithms themselves (or implementations thereof).

Remember - their aim isn't to break encryption (which would be simple to spot) - it's to make it easier for them to break, while remaining hard for everyone else.

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> I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel

The cryptography community seems to already be aware of this risk. I've read about random number algorithms that mix the results of many randomness sources so that one compromised source cannot compromise the result.

> and the next-best targets would be "enclaves"

Yeah, we should watch out for this. Secure cryptoprocessors are a great thing but we need to be able to trust them. We already have hardware that runs free software but the chip itself can of course be compromised...

> then back-dooring the algorithms themselves

I trust that the worldwide cryptography community will never let that happen. From what I've read they no longer trust the NSA implicitly.

> I trust that the worldwide cryptography community will never let that happen.

I wonder who puts in more expert man-hours into safeguarding/defeating crypto: the US alphabet soup agencies, or the rest of the of the "worldwide cryptography community". I'm fairly certain the government spends more dollars (doing things like factoring enough primes AOT to be able to decrypt ~20% of all https traffic in realtime[1]). Often things that community concludes to be "unlikely" or "difficult" are well within the governments ability - cue "SSL added and removed here ;-)"

I think the fact that the cryptography community didn't pick up on Crypto AG's subterfuge says a lot, IMO.

1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-t...

How much access did the cryptography community have to Crypto AG’s cipher machines? I thought those were mostly sold to foreign military/diplomatic missions.

> I've read about random number algorithms that mix the results of many randomness sources so that one compromised source cannot compromise the result.

You might like djb's article "Entropy Attacks!": https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html

And any hardware protection that flows through a supply chain including just FedEx/ups/dhl can be compromised at the hardware level.

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