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Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography

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Full article122 words · extracted from schneier.com · click to collapse

The NSA has been abandoning secret and proprietary cryptographic algorithms in favor of commercial public algorithms, generally known as “Suite B.” In 2010, an NSA employee filed some sort of whistleblower complaint, alleging that this move is both insecure and wasteful. The US DoD Inspector General investigated and wrote a report in 2011.

The report—slightly redacted and declassified—found that there was no wrongdoing. But the report is an interesting window into the NSA’s system of algorithm selection and testing (pages 5 and 6), as well as how they investigate whistleblower complaints.

Tags: algorithms, cryptography, encryption, NSA, whistleblowers

Posted on November 9, 2016 at 12:00 PM21 Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.

Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/whistleblower_i.html