Did the RSA collaborate with the NSA for just $10 million?

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There are always two sides to a coin, but at this point, the RSA’s image is definitely going to take a beating. Whether it entered into such an agreement willingly or not doesn’t take away the fact that there are vulnerabilities in some of the current encryption standards.

This is very disturbing indeed.

Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

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