When The NSA Made Crypto Better

In 2013, Edward Snowden outlined how the NSA had pushed a specific elliptic curve method as a standard — Dual_EC_DRBG (Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator) — and which they knew that they could crack. There is thus always a challenge for law enforcement agencies in creating backdoors in cryptography, in that they will provide them with an advantage over their adversaries. But, there is a case from the 1990s of the…