Monday December 5th: The NSA Backdoor in a Cybersecurity Standard

[James Kolles]

Marc Kjerland, a graduate student from University of Illinois at Chicago will be giving a talk called “The NSA Backdoor in a Cybersecurity Standard”.   He gave a talk about cryptography back when I was a student in the Math Club and he was at the University of Minnesota, I’m looking forward to having him back.

Here is his abstract:

The recent leaks by Edward Snowden have put the National Security Agency under close scrutiny, and have raised doubts about our trust in cybersecurity standards. Are the Internet's encryption standards vulnerable to snooping from third parties? In this talk I will explain some modern encryption practices, including elliptic curve cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and I will describe the vulnerability of a pseudo-random number generator believed to have originated from the NSA. Introductory knowledge of number theory and cryptography will be helpful, but not required, to follow this talk! This talk is based on material from "The NSA back door to NIST" by Thomas C. Hales