Hacker and the State

What Hacker News says

1. DaftDankSep 2021
   Reading about this saga in Ben Buchanan's book "The Hacker and the State" made me realize how every government agency (NIST in this case) seems to be always second fiddle to the "needs" of the NSA/national security apparatus. It seems clear from the book that there was a point in time when they essentially just left it in the NSA's hands to develop, knowing it was probably not secure. Not exactly some huge revelation that the national security apparatus can exert power and leverage over other government groups, or even private companies, but the extent to which it happens was surprising.
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2. jkapturDec 2020
   I really enjoyed The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan. It explores why various nations pursue cyber operations the way they do.
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3. jstriebMay 2020
   For a recent take on the geopolitical effects of Stuxnet and many other cyber attacks, I can recommend The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Dr. Ben Buchanan.

   I found it to be a fascinating account of international cyber attacks with a clear, well-argued thesis.

   https://www.amazon.com/Hacker-State-Attacks-Normal-Geopoliti...

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4. hovavOct 2023
   Even with a verifiably random key, Dual EC is still unacceptable.

   First, because its output has unacceptable biases [1,2].

   Second, because its presence allows an attacker to create a difficult-to-detect backdoor simply by replacing the key, as apparently happened with Juniper NetScreen devices [3,4].

   --- [1] Kristian Gjøsteen, Comments on Dual-EC-DRBG/NIST SP 800-90, draft December 2005. Online: https://web.archive.org/web/20110525081912/https://www.math....

   [2] Berry Schoenmakers and Andrey Sidorenko, Cryptanalysis of the Dual Elliptic Curve Pseudorandom Generator, May 2006. Online: https://eprint.iacr.org/2006/190.pdf

   [3] Stephen Checkoway, Jacob Maskiewicz, Christina Garman, Joshua Fried, Shaanan Cohney, Matthew Green, Nadia Heninger, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Eric Rescorla, and Hovav Shacham, A Systematic Analysis of the Juniper Dual EC Incident, October 2016. Online: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~hovav/dist/juniper.pdf

   [4] Ben Buchanan, The Hacker and the State, chapter 3, Building a Backdoor. Harvard University Press, February 2020.

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5. DaftDankAug 2021
   Is there a possibility that this could be some kind of Dual_EC type of backdoor they are trying to insert under the guise of something "positive" -- i.e. CSAM? As others have said elsewhere, it seems so out of the blue like they were pressured from somewhere, which I guess I default to assuming government. After reading "The Hacker and the State" by Ben Buchanan, it made me even more aware of how much depth and penetration there is of the private-government partnership in the US.
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