How far did the NSA go to weaken cryptography standards?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is usually seen as an impartial judge of standards, so this was potentially catastrophic. This week, NIST denied the allegations, saying they would never "deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard," but the damage was done. Had the NSA been poisoning the well of cryptography?

The articles don't name specific programs as a concession to law enforcement, but the program was widely assumed to be a standard called the DUAL_EC_DRBG, which many have suspected of being an NSA plant for years. The algorithm works as a random number generator, but if it doesn’t work as advertised, it could easily serve as a backdoor codebreak for a third party like the NSA. (Most encryption schemes rely on random numbers to foil code-breakers, but if the NSA can guess the "random" string, it makes the code much easier to crack.) Early suspicions were also raised by two Microsoft engineers, John Kelsey and Niels Ferguson, which is consistent with the New York Times' description of the plant. If it's true, it's both good and bad news: the NSA really did get a bad standard approved by one of the most important boards in cryptography, but it probably didn't do them any good.

source  theverge.com