The RSA concerns started with documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published by the New York Times in December. These indicated that the NSA had worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a "backdoor" in the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG), a pseudorandom number generator designated as a standard for encryption. According to the documents, in 2004-even before NIST approved it as a standard-the NSA paid RSA $10 million to use Dual EC DRGB as part of its RSA BSAFE cryptographic library. This meant that much of the encryption software sold by RSA would allow the NSA to break the encryption using the known backdoor
The RSA concerns started with documents leaked by Edward Snowden and
published by the New York Times in December. These indicated that the NSA
had worked with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to
create a "backdoor" in the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit
Generator (Dual_EC_DRBG), a pseudorandom number generator designated as a
standard for encryption. According to the documents, in 2004-even before
NIST approved it as a standard-the NSA paid RSA $10 million to use Dual EC
DRGB as part of its RSA BSAFE cryptographic library. This meant that much
of the encryption software sold by RSA would allow the NSA to break the
encryption using the known backdoor