Questions Linger as Juniper Removes Backdoored Dual_EC RNG

Juniper Networks announced late Friday it was removing the suspicious Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator from its ScreenOS operating system.

And while that’s heralded as a positive move considering Dual_EC’s dubious origins, there remain important and unanswered questions about Juniper’s decision to include what is considered to be a backdoored random number generator in its NetScreen VPNs, and why a number of strange coding and engineering decisions were made that could have facilitated the decryption of secure traffic.