alt Hacker News> Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES
Is this true? The NSA pushed for weaker cryptography it could break versus stronger cryptography our adversaries couldn't?
It's complicated. The federal government pushed for a smaller DES key size, but also fixed the DES s-boxes to resist differential cryptanalysis.