• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    152 days ago

    Is there gov money in folding proteins though? I assume there’s a lot of 3 letter agencies what want decryption with a lot more funding.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      232 days ago

      There’s plenty of publicly funded research for that, yes.

      Three letter agencies also want to protect their own nation’s secrets. They have as much interest in breaking it as they do protecting against it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 day ago

        yes of course, and nuclear arsenal build up doesn’t exist because govts have that kinda foresight

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          13
          edit-2
          1 day ago

          Except there’s evidence they do, in fact, go both directions.

          For example, DES had its s-boxes messed with by the NSA. At the time, the thought was that they were intentionally weakening it. Some years later, public cryptographers developed differential cryptanalysis for breaking ciphers. They found that the new s-boxes in DES made it resistant to differential cryptanalysis. It appears the NSA had already developed the technique and had made DES stronger, not weaker. Because again, they need to protect their own stuff, too, and they used and promoted DES to get there.

          They also gave it a really short key that was expected to be broken by the '90s, which is also exactly what happened.

          They appear to be going a similar direction with elliptic curves. They seem to be resistant against certain attacks, and the NSA was promoting them earlier than most public cryptographers.