The National Security Agency’s cybersecurity chief has claimed that next-generation encryption standards under development in the US will be unbreachable, even by the American government spies themselves.
“There are no backdoors,” Rob Joyce, the NSA’s director of cybersecurity, told Bloomberg in an interview on Friday. The agency has been involved in the process of developing the new standards, which are designed to protect data from future quantum computers, but Joyce promised there won’t be any deliberate flaws injected in the algorithms.
President Joe Biden’s administration has called for implementing quantum-resistant cryptography protecting sensitive data across the US economy by 2035. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will provide the new algorithms underpinning that cryptography.
The NIST has been running a public competition since 2016 to choose the best algorithms and is expected to announce the winners soon. In 2020 the institute has whittled the entries down to seven finalists from around the world.