> Often there is also value in breaking crypto so that the targeted > crypto users don't know it has been broken and thus continue to use > it (the algorithm and/or the specific key). If a big government > organization (take your pick) had broken algorithm/keysize xyz, would > they tell anybody?
Hard to say. Quite possibly, yes, they'd tell the entire world. Take AES as an example: if AES had a serious flaw that could be exploited to recover ciphertext, it's quite possible the people who discovered it would decide the risk to the world's financial systems from keeping it secret far outweighed any benefit that might be had. As a real-world example, look at the history of SHA. The original SHA (just called SHA, although sometimes [inaccurately] called SHA-0) was designed by the NSA and published as a government standard in 1993. In 1995 the NSA announced there were flaws in SHA and issued a new standard, SHA-1, that addressed these problems. The NSA never went public with the precise vulnerability in SHA that caused them to develop and release SHA-1, but they were quite open and public about SHA being insecure and needing to be replaced as soon as possible. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
