Your Cryptography Conspiracy Theory Is Wrong

This conversation plays out hundreds of times a day, but (thankfully) only a handful of those involve me: Person: “I have [problem].” Cryptography nerd: “Oh, you probably want to use [sensible recommendation].” Person: “Ah, well, can I really trust that? The NSA probably backdoored it 30 years ago. Dual_EC, amirite?!” Cryptography nerd: … Koblitz and Menezes, unheard: “You fucking wot m8?“ Conspiracy theories about the NSA and/or NIST are a dime a dozen these days. And, ever since the Snowden disclosures in 2013, I am politically primed to directionally agree with distrusting the US government wholesale. But most of the technical arguments baked into folks’ conspiracy theories make no goddamn sense. This distrust is not exclusive to only the US government. The goal of this blog post is not to convince you that you should trust any government; just that they are not magical or omniscient. To that end, I’m going to explore some of the history of NSA, NIST, and cryptography…