Hacker News Reader

Comment by pepve | Hacker News Reader

It irks me that many people are calling this a backdoor. It's not. It's a vulnerability. You have to exploit it to get in.

View on HN

It's a PRNG based on a trapdoor function where apparently the NSA has the key. With that key they can recover the RNG state from just a small amount of it.

Thats a backdoor by most descriptions. This isn't just a bug.

Snowden obviously has that key as well.

Haha what? Not only is there no way of knowing that, but it's not even relevant.

An intentionally introduced vulnerability can be considered a backdoor, even if it's not a matter of saying "open sesame" to open the so-called backdoor.

Yes. The magic, poorly-documented constants are the "public key" while the "private key" is known only to the construction's author.

I upvoted you, you make a good point.

It's a backdoor. The original paper describing the hole is (hopefully) entitled "On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng"[0]. It's no longer a "possibility".

[0] http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf

Uh, yes it is still a "possibility". Unless you have a source I missed, which is possible but please actually cite it, all we learned about Dual_EC from the NSA leak was that the algorithm was designed at NSA. Lots of crypto is designed at NSA; it isn't all presumed to backdoored.

Serious question: what's the difference? I would have followed the definition for backdoor since it relies on particular secret information relating P and Q that the NSA might have—but where should one draw the line between backdoors and vulnerabilities? Intent?

Repeating my comment:

An intentionally introduced vulnerability can be considered a backdoor, even if it's not a matter of saying "open sesame" to open the so-called backdoor.

So yes, it's pretty much a matter of intent.

Nerd's law: A commenter C declares that concepts X and Y are completely different. Because parent commenter P failed to make this point, P is intellectually inferior to C. Hence C > P for all X and Y.

How do you figure? The scandal around the NSA PRNG is indeed a backdoor, is it not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com