Quote from: DavidZ on December 25, 2013, 07:48:39 AM

Quote from: empoweoqwj on December 25, 2013, 05:27:51 AM

Quote from: bluemeanie1 on December 24, 2013, 11:51:07 PM

Quote from: DavidZ on December 24, 2013, 11:24:44 PM

The web site is back up, fascinating article. Despicable conduct by the "folks" at the NSA and I'm glad their scam has been exposed thanks to the genius and heroism of Edward Snowden.

ya, It's really incredible that they are running this enormous scam right under the public's noses. I had even stated on here a number of months ago that our crypto standards are sabotaged by the NSA, the general response from the people on here was that this was a nonsense 'conspiracy theory'.

The real story is starting to come to light, that the field of cryptography is something like a scientific con game.

But what to do?

Having studied computer science I can tell you that cryptography is not a con. Strong encryption is entirely possible; just need to be wary of backdoors.

As to what you can do: Hire a trusted programmer to write your own cryptography application.

while avoiding standards can sometimes give you better security the problem is the level of security is UNKNOWN. In addition you have to build and support your own standards, and most importantly you need to promote your own standards. Who is going to trust 'Bob's super special encryption algorithm'? (at this point who is going to trust NSA's super special encryption algorithm?

).

the way the field of crypto works is that the 'officials' namely the NSA and friends declare various standards usable ONLY after they have fully vetted mathematical backdoors into the algorithms. ECC had been around for decades, but only after they had established a deep body of work in the field of elliptic curves(Wiles' Fermat Proof) was ECC given the green light, standards are published and supporting technology is released. Generally most people use the standardized packages for their crypto and apparently knowledge to implement your own is scarcely to be found. Bouncy Castle is a good example, it started as an independent project but seems to have taken on a different life these days. It would interesting to know what relevance the standardized curves have in the work Wiles' established, but I don't have the time to work it out.

unfortunately there are people on here who might have managed to get through the basics of cryptography who then declare themselves 'experts'. There was an earlier thread that one person on here is stalking me as a result of where there were errors in the EC equations, I point this out and suddenly I provoke the ire of a number of anonymous self-appointed experts... and so it goes. If you take the opinions on a board like this seriously, you have a screw loose.