Post #1044457

2026-04-10 04:17 UTC

There’s a pretty good blog post about potential backdoors in RSA on the Cloudflare blog but honestly I remember reading rumors about it on obscure internet forums and mailing lists going back a long time. For Ec25519, there’s some stuff about it in the History section of the wikipedia article.

Replies (1)

@CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-04-10 04:53

Isn't the NSA portion in that Wikipedia article just explaining why people moved to using ec25519? It says: > In 2013, interest began to increase considerably when it was discovered that the NSA had potentially implemented a backdoor into the P-256 curve based Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm.[12] While not directly related,[13] suspicious aspects of the NIST's P curve constants[14] led to concerns[15] that the NSA had chosen values that gave them an advantage in breaking the encryption.[16][17] > >>"I no longer trust the constants. I believe the NSA has manipulated them through their relationships with industry." > >— Bruce Schneier, The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet (2013) > >Since 2013, Curve25519 has become the de facto alternative to P-256, being used in a wide variety of applications.[18] Starting in 2014, OpenSSH[19] defaults to Curve25519-based ECDH and GnuPG adds support for Ed25519 keys for signing and encryption.[20] The use of the curve was eventually standardized for both key exchange and signature in 2020.[21][22] That seems to say that people left P-256 for Curve25519.

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