The Strange Tale of Dual_EC_DRBG

Julian Assange being arrested recently brought back memories of how he leaked Edward Snowden’s memos around the possible existence of an NSA-sourced cryptographic backdoor — the Dual EC standard (Dual_EC_DRBG). So let’s dive into the method and the trap door, and see the “magic” behind it.

With Elliptic Curve methods, we take an elliptic curve (y²=x³+ax+b), and then use a base point (G). Next, we generate…