Noel Chiappa wrote:
> From: Dmitry Burkov <dburk(_at_)burkov(_dot_)aha(_dot_)ru>
> I think that it is not a constructive way to discuss this issue
> following some conspiracy theories.
Understood, but at the same time there may be some value to being curious as
to why the Russian authorities have mandated the use of a local standard.
The problem is that the explanation given is so universal that
it can only be wrong.
There may be a mandate for specific algorithms for particular uses,
but it is completely unbelievable that it is _as_universal_as_stated_.
And since the problem that is quoted is a political or contractual
one, and _NOT_ a technical one, it makes no sense to discuss
technical solutions for a presumably completely misunderstood
political or contractual issue.
Pretty much all of the software from outside of russia contains
implementations of some cryptographic algorithms. And a lot of
software uses these algorithms, i.e. most software vendors
(Microsoft, Unix players, Linux Distros and network gear (Cisco?)
use it for the distribution of their software.
Is it just some sort of 'not invented here', or some other similar cause
(which is, I agree, not very interesting); or is there a desire to use a
different algorithm because there some sort of weakness to the standard
algorithm most countries are using, a weakness which has only been detected
by some entity somewhere in Russia?
I assume it is the fear about backdoors.
They know that nobody else besides themselves was given the a chance
to plant back doors into their algorithms, for design flaws it is
a level playing field for all, and for attacks, they currently have
the same "nice" advantage that firefox has over MSIE with regards
to probability of attacks. So from pure a risk management perspective
mandating GOST provides some benefit, in theory.
Their symmetric cipher with a blocksize of 64 bits and a key size
of 256 bits is less convincing (because of the small blocksize).
-Martin
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