On the Juniper backdoor
An aspect I haven't seen discussed yet:<p>Many people seem to presume that the custom value of Q used by Juniper was done so that either they or some confederate could passively decrypt communications.  The existence of a pre-intrustion bug that leaked the required bytes to allow this would seem to point in this direction as well.<p>But if someone was already making use of this backdoor, wouldn't they have quickly noticed if they lost access?   And if this someone was Juniper (or someone allied with them) wouldn't they have been able to (perhaps silently) report and revert the change to regain access?  It would seem that no one who knew the secret value objected to the change.<p>And now Juniper is fixing the problem by reverting to the original non-standard value, avoiding the presumed NSA-compromised recommended value.   But what's special about that original value that they go out of their way to return to it?  If their goal was truly security, why not hash something "provably" secure, as suggested in the article?<p>What's an interpretation of events where all these things make sense?   The one that makes the most sense to me is to assume that the entity that made the "unsolicited" change to Q was the same as the one who knew the secret of the original, and they change was made because they wanted to restrict someone else's access.   But this doesn't fit with the change back to the original, rather than to a new value.