• Chemical Wonka@discuss.tchncs.de
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    14 days ago

    My undergraduate professor once worked for one of the largest banks in Germany, and she told me clearly that all encryption algorithms exported by the US have a way of being broken. A backdoor in the algorithm? Perhaps

    • finderscult@lemmy.ml
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      14 days ago

      Not really. Certainly some “encryption” algorithms or really implementations have backdoors, but RSA for example doesn’t. Encryption is only worthwhile if it’s mathematically sound, and you can’t backdoor mathematics without some random undergrad working on their maths degree figuring out for fun.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      14 days ago

      When was this? In years past there were weird restrictions about exporting strong encryption algorithms from the US. So much so that Java didn’t have unlimited strength algorithms bundled by default. Depending on the time she said this/she was talking about then it could’ve just been a comment on the weak algorithms being, well, weak.