Thursday, January 16, 2014

NSA backdoor patented by BlackBerry - Macworld

blackberry, rim, press

News Encryption Standard Dual_EC_DRBG has a known vulnerability that recently as NSA backdoor is interpreted. In 2005, it applied for a patent. And that patent is owned by a BlackBerry daughter.

The patent is owned by the company Certicom, since early 2009, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry (formerly RIM), says security expert Jeffrey Carr. Certicom boasts more than 350 patents (and patent applications) for Elliptic Curve Cryptography crucial aspects of (ECC). This includes a patent on creating random numbers above: elliptic curve random number generation

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Those random numbers used for encrypting data, appear to be less random than expected. As a result, data encrypted with this standard method is not secured. Certicom itself reports that provide the core technology for the encyptiestandaard NSA Suite B which serves to secure government communications.

The flaw in this standard has been discovered in 2007 by security researchers at Microsoft. At that time, the U.S. National Security Agency was the biggest proponents and promoter of this encryption method, which was also the chief architect. Since last year, the outcoming revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden have interpreted as a backdoor vulnerability deliberately applied, which makes a lot of dust controversy.


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