Q&A: Schneier on trust, NSA spying and the end of US internet hegemony

Avere takes Edge-Core to the cloud

RSA 2014 Bruce Schneier is the man who literally wrote the book on modern encryption, publishing Applied Cryptography in 1994, and for the past 20 years has been an important and sometimes outspoken voice in the security industry.

He founded the firm Counterpane Internet Security (later sold to BT), and is also a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

More recently he's been working on documents released by Edward Snowden on NSA activities and presented his findings at this year's RSA conference in San Francisco. The Register took the opportunity of sitting down with Schneier at the event and chewing through the current state of security, privacy and government intrusion online.

The Reg: This conference opened with a statement from RSA chief Art Coviello regarding the use of the flawed NSA-championed Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator in an encryption toolkit product.

Coviello said RSA did all it could to secure its software. What's your take on the affair?

Schneier: I believe that's true. When NIST came out with that RNG standard, it was one of four choices available, and those choices tracked other crypto suites. It made sense in a holistic way that there should be an elliptic curve in there. It was slower, it was kludgier, but some people thought that was a plus, not a minus.

By 2007 there was the first inkling that there might be a backdoor, but it was just guessing and it is part of the NIST standard. Any toolkit that says "we're compliant" [with a particular standard], which I'm sure is a requirement for all sorts of contracts, had to implement it.

My guess is that RSA didn't know anything was amiss and when a large customer comes in with technical changes that dont really matter you just do them. I think RSA was more a victim here, and I think it's been unfortunate that over the last couple of months they haven't been able to tell their story clearly.

It's hard to tease out who did what and when. Certainly, I didn't boycott the RSA conference I'm here for myself and the attendees, not for RSA and if I was going to list companies to boycott because of their NSA collaboration, RSA wouldnt even make the top 10.

Excerpt from:
Q&A: Schneier on trust, NSA spying and the end of US internet hegemony