Bruce Schneier on one of the “Deterministic Random Bit Generators” supplied by the U.S. government:

“But today there’s an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described a backdoor.”

To copy common phrasing of the author himself, This is a big deal.

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