NSA Swears On The Body Of Ed Snowden It Will Not Backdoor New Encryption Standard
Maybe it’s occasionally OK to shoot the messenger. You know, maybe one to the knee to help determine whether or not they can be trusted.
The NSA — which has undermined encryption standards in the past — says it won’t undermine the next strain of encryption, one being built to withstand the inevitable arrival of quantum computing.
The US is readying new encryption standards that will be so ironclad that even the nation’s top code-cracking agency says it won’t be able to bypass them.
The National Security Agency has been involved in parts of the process but insists it has no way of bypassing the new standards.
“There are no backdoors,” said Rob Joyce, the NSA’s director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, in an interview.
Pardon my cynicism, but that’s exactly the sort of thing someone planning to backdoor encryption would say. The NSA has backdoored encryption standards in the past, something exposed by the Snowden leaks. And while Snowden’s current residence in a country apparently desirous of instigating World War III looks extremely questionable in hindsight, it doesn’t take anything away from the factual revelations he delivered to the world.
