Agency denies helping NSA beat encryption

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a Commerce Department agency that sets technical standards, is denying that it helped the National Security Agency "deliberately weaken" encryption.

"We want to assure the [information technology] cybersecurity community that the transparent, public process used to rigorously vet our standards is still in place NIST said in a statement. The Guardian and The New York Times reported that the NSA successfully got NIST to adopt its version of a security standard in 2006. The standard included vulnerabilities that NSA hackers could later exploit to spy on private communications, the papers reported. NIST is not a regulatory agency — it only helps private groups agree on voluntary standards and guidelines. If outside groups stop trusting the NIST, it could undermine the agency's usefulness.