In reply to Bob.

Bob,

Thanks for the reply and apologies for the delay (the holiday season got me a bit backlogged).

I’m not sure who you mean by Chris White so will just focus on the real issue: this is about who Cisco is and what we stand for.

Plainly stated, we have a strict Cisco wide policy on backdoors. We do not knowingly enable them in our products, we do not deliberately build them into our products, and we do not work with any organization or government to
implement them in our products.

We also make this explicit publicly so all interested parties (you, our customers, shareholders) know our position, and there will be no ambiguity:

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/security/psirt/security_vulnerability_policy.html#psi

And, given crypto is a huge topic these days as you note, I can recommend this October 2013 blog to you about how we choose and implement crypto, written by Anthony Grieco (great guy, works in my team, super smart):

http://blogs.cisco.com/security/a-crypto-conversation-how-we-choose-algorithms

–jns