NSA, PGP and RSA

[Pete Stephenson]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 3:09 AM, Robin Mathew Rajan
<robinmathewrajan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> I'm Robin Mathew Rajan from India and I'm a new member here. I'm also new to
> PGP cryptographic concepts. I've some experiences with some other forms of
> crypto concepts though. I wish to explore more about PGP.

Excellent! Welcome!

> Straight to my question! According to many speculations out in the public,
> NSA has weakened RSA algorithm. Is it still safe to use the RSA as the
> underlying algorithm for generating the keys? Are there any viable
> alternatives which we can choose over RSA and DSA?
> Please correct me if I'm wrong. :)

There were some reports of RSA (the company) accepting funds from the
NSA to make Dual_EC_DRBG (a poor-quality and possibly backdoored
pseudorandom number generator) the default in their BSAFE toolkit.

RSA (the algorithm) is, as far as publicly-available knowledge goes,
still secure with appropriate key lengths and the non-existence of
suitably-powerful quantum computers.

Version 2.1 of GnuPG will support elliptic curve crypto, which will be
nice. However, ECDSA and ECDH (the signing and encryption algorithms
used in GnuPG 2.1) are also vulnerable to quantum computers.

Of course, it's certainly possible that the NSA or other adversaries
have compromised RSA or other algorithms, but there's no
publicly-available proof of this.

Cheers!
-Pete

-- 
Pete Stephenson