The Reuters headline “Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight“ actually sounds good for those of us who are upset of the NSA’s history of pushing insecure and backdoored cryptography into standards (see also these nice  sounding  headlines ). However, when having a closer look these headlines are actually quite misleading. The truth is rather that the NSA gets away with pushing two block ciphers into an international ISO standard despite i) its recent history of undermining standards and ii) the fact that they ignored best-practices in publishing the two ciphers.

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