For many years, we’ve been living in a sort of golden age of digital encryption. This is no longer of interest just to the military or other federal agencies that want to secure their data. Indeed, our economy depends upon encryption to secure everything from our routine banking and credit card transactions to keeping our texts and browsing secure.
Sadly, most of the encryption methods are reaching their end of life. The problem is quantum computing, which makes brute forcing these methods practical. The good news is that new methods that are resistant to quantum computer attacks are being developed and will shortly be deployed.
The standardization of these new methods is being handled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) but, of course, all the real expertise resides at the NSA, which is involved with new standards. The problem is that no one trusts the NSA to not weaken the methods or arrange for a backdoor that they can use to spy on our communications.
The NSA has no one but themselves to blame. There have been several documented cases of the NSA trying to sneak backdoors into both national and private crypto primitives. This time, though, the NSA is crossing its heart and promising not to put any backdoors into the new standards. The demurrals are being met with substantial skepticism.
One doesn’t have to be overly cynical to be suspicious. The NSA, after all, does have a history of doing exactly what people are suspecting them of doing. On the other hand, they are, sometimes, honest brokers. Back in the early 1970s when DES was being developed, the NSA suggested some mysterious and unexplained changes to the S-boxes at the heart of the method. People were very suspicious but a couple of decades later it was revealed that those changes were, in fact, to harden DES against the still secret differential cryptanalysis method for breaking ciphers.
Things are different now. The NSA no longer has an (American) monopoly on cryptographic knowledge and techniques. Whatever they propose will be put under the microscope and it’s unlikely those doing the investigations will keep their findings secret.