I've already podcasted Peter's presentation, but I thought a follow up interview was warranted. To cut a long story short, he does believe some crypto standards have been subverted by the NSA, but says some fears about government crypto-fiddling are misplaced. In general, he says, it's a lot easier for attackers to bypass encryption than it is for them to break it.

Peter knows crypto. He's a professor at Auckland University, has written crypto libraries and even had a hand in writing PGP.

I started off by asking Peter for his thoughts on the controversial dual elliptic curve number generator. Was it really backdoored by the NSA?