[xnull]

Bug volume in crypto is extremely high. How many developers reuse IVs in stream ciphers? How many blindly use AES or somesuch other symmetric library and then build in no authentication whatsoever? How many antequated implementations of RSA are used in practice today (see recent Bleichenbacher flaw in NSS)? How many times are poor chaining modes for block ciphers chosen? How many implementations of [anything] fail on side cases (elliptic curves) or massively leak through side channels? How many DH-family protocols miss checks for identity inputs?

The answer is a lot.

[tptacek]

You and I mean different things by "crypto vulnerabilities". I took the parent comment to mean things like the RC4 biases; like I said, things for which the "fix" would involve entirely new algorithms or constructions. An example of this kind of NSA disclosure would be the DES s-boxes.

Crypto software implementation vulnerabilities are very common, but the kinds of things you're talking about are most often found in obscure and/or serverside software. Look at the tempo at which bugs like the NSS e=3 bug are released; it's like once or twice a year.

[xnull]

I think implementation bugs are within the spirit of OP, especially provided the NSA claims to have provided an implementation fix for Heartbleed.

The sorts of bugs I'm talking about exist in client and popular software. As far as tempo is concerned this year alone has given us BERserk, gotofail, Android Master Key, OpenSSL fork(), Bitcoin's use of P256, GNUTLS X.509 parsing bug, the OpenSSL compiler optimization+processor family randomness bug, and others.

If we were to entertain OP's point maybe there would be a faster tempo if the NSA were helping out. :)