A few years back I had the chance to talk with Joan Daemen after he gave a presentation about keccak, which hadn't won the competition yet. This was way before Snowden. He was very sceptical about the use of his work. He thought it was fun doing it, but it didn't have any use, since everything has backdoors anyway. That's what he said. Sounded a bit paranoid to me back then, but now it sounds a lot more plausible.
It seems to be the standard for cryptographers to never endorse or recommend any particular solution, because they know that it will eventually have holes.
It's similar to how scientists won't advocate their findings as anything more than probable. Seeing as for something to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. Therefor there's always the possibility of unknown errors in their methodology negating their findings.
I once had the opportunity to talk with Joan Daemen, one of the designers of Keccak, and also of AES.
He said that he liked to do what he did, because it's fun, but he didn't really believe that it was very usefull. Because everything has backdoors.
At that time I didn't think much of it, I just thought it was kinda funny that an important cryptographer had such views about his work. But in the light of the NSA developments it's a bit different.
I have no idea what to think of it. Did he know about what the NSA did? Or was he just a bit pessimistic, but he turned out to be right?
This does of course not mean that he made backdoors in AES and Keccak for the NSA. If that were the case he probably would not be allowed to speak about it, and he did talk about it very non-chalantly.
