September 27th, 2004
How smart is the NSA?
Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about the cyptography standards and speculates on how much of a technology advantage the secretive, super spys at the National Security Agency (NSA) has versus rest of the known world…
So, how good is the NSA at cryptography? They’re certainly better than the academic world. They have more mathematicians working on the problems, they’ve been working on them longer, and they have access to everything published in the academic world, while they don’t have to make their own results public. But are they a year ahead of the state of the art? Five years? A decade? No one knows.
It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES. This means that back in the ’70s, the National Security Agency was two decades ahead of the state of the art.
Today, the NSA is still smarter, but the rest of us are catching up quickly. In 1999, the academic community discovered a weakness in another NSA algorithm, SHA, that the NSA claimed to have discovered only four years previously. And just last week there was a published analysis of the NSA’s SHA-1 that demonstrated weaknesses that we believe the NSA didn’t know about at all.
Maybe now we’re just a couple of years behind.
