Youch

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: RSA warns developers not to use RSA products: "In today's news of the weird, RSA (a division of EMC) has recommended that developers desist from using the (allegedly) 'backdoored' Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator -- which happens to be the default in RSA's BSafe cryptographic toolkit. Youch.

In case you're missing the story here, Dual_EC_DRBG (which I wrote about yesterday) is the random number generator voted most likely to be backdoored by the NSA. The story here is that -- despite many valid concerns about this generator -- RSA went ahead and made it the default generator used for all cryptography in its flagship cryptography library. The implications for RSA and RSA-based products are staggering. In the worst case a modestly bad but by no means worst case, the NSA may be able to intercept SSL/TLS connections made by products implemented with BSafe. "