Investigation into the Impacts of Migration to Emergent NSA Suite B Encryption Standards

As information sharing becomes increasingly necessary for mission accomplishment within the Department of Defense, the rules for protecting information have tightened. The sustained and rapid advancement of information technology in the 21st century dictates the adoption of a flexible and adaptable cryptographic strategy for protecting national security information. RSA techniques, while formidable, have begun to present vulnerabilities to the raw computing power that is commercially available today. This thesis is a comprehensive characterization of the current state of the art in DoD encryption standards. It will emphasize the mathematical algorithms that facilitate legacy encryption and its proposed NSA Suite B replacements. We will look at how the new technology addresses the latest threats and vulnerabilities that legacy methods do not fully mitigate. It will then summarize the findings of the security capabilities of NSA Suite B standards as compared to the costs in manpower and money to implement them, and suggest how to best utilize NSA Suite B technology for the purpose of providing confidentiality, integrity and availability in an environment with real world threats.