The Strange Tail of Nelson Mandela, The NSA and A Backdoor Cipher

I love cipher cracking, and have tried to implement most of the well-known ciphers here. Along with this, I also am intrigued by a very human intervention: the crypto backdoor. Perhaps, its a child-like trait, and where children often love sending secret messages to their friends? But, like a child, we often loved listening to the secret conversations of our friends and in spying on those we were not suppose too — it was fun and part of learning about our world. We, though, as adults, have learnt to control our desire to spy on others — but it is still inside us.

Overall, the skill of inserting a backdoor often requires a great deal of knowledge of cipher implementations, and which then creates a trapdoor that allows a privileged person in, but not others. It is a magic wand, and which allows the ‘good’ in, and the ‘bad’ out. The deception is that anyone doing a cryptoanalysis, cannot see where the backdoor has been installed. These days, luckily, our trapdoor method is provided by public key encryption, and where the private key is the magic wand.

One previously suspected backdoor is the NSA-derived PC-1000Cr encryption method. And, so, just this week, Stefan Marsiske announced that he had finally broken the method, and has managed to crack the cipher in just 4 seconds with only 17 characters of ciphertext…