In 2016, Juniper removed the backdoored Dual_EC DRBG algorithm, impacting its ScreenOS operating system. NIST also withdrew the algorithm, citing security concern.

Juniper’s use of Dual_EC dates to 2008, at least a year after Dan Shumow and Neils Ferguson’s landmark presentation at the CRYPTO conference, which first cast suspicion on Dual_EC being backdoored by the NSA.

To many, Juniper’s move to remove Dual_EC (and also ANSI X9.31 PRNG) confirmed the widely held belief the vulnerabilities were tied to operations by the NSA described in the 2013 article published by the German publication Der Spiegel. That article described the existence of a catalog of hardware and software tools used by the NSA to infiltrate equipment manufactured by Juniper, Cisco and Huawei. The story was based on leaked 2013 document by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Calls for encryption backdoors date back to the 1990s and the so-called Crypto Wars. That’s when President Bill Clinton’s administration insisted that U.S. government have a way to break the encryption that was exported outside of the United States.