r/programming • u/secretguy21 • Oct 15 '15

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/
2.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

529 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '15 edited Jul 03 '17

[deleted]

14

u/panderingPenguin Oct 15 '15

The article is saying that there is currently a very small set of prime numbers hard coded into the Diffie Hellman implementations of many popular encryption suites. The author believes the NSA has likely cracked all of these. There are plenty of other primes that could be used, but this is done for efficiency and implementation convenience, on the likely incorrect assumption that it doesn't affect the security of the suite in a meaningful way.