5. Identifying backdoors: The AES case and others

5.1 Overview of the Issue

• The difficulty of detecting backdoors depends on their nature.

  • From an implementation and/or management standpoint, detection is only a matter of time. The numerous known cases have shown that when faced with hackers (through hardware and software reverse engineering), sooner or later the mechanism is discovered, understood, and exploited.

  • When it comes to mathematical backdoors, the situation is much more complicated, if not impossible to resolve. When the backdoor technique is disclosed in advance (as in the case of DUAL_ECC_DRBG