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                Date: 2000-09-06
                 
                 
                Ad PGP-Sicherheitsloch: Handbuch NSA-Sabotage
                
                 
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      Nicht ganz taufrisch, aber sehr knapp und übersichtlich  
zusammengefasst und mit allen nötigen Links - ein kleines  
Round-Up des Wissens darüber, wie die NSA ihr nicht  
genehme Software kompromittiert. 
 
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relayed by g'o'tz ohnesorge <gohnesorge@lh- 
computertechnik.de> 
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A pocket guide to NSA sabotage  
 
Doug Porter  
 
The NSA engages in sabotage, much of it against American  
companies and products. One campaign apparently occurred  
at about the time when PGP's most serious vulnerability was  
added.  
 
To understand the whole story requires some background.  
 
In Bruce Schneier's newsletter Crypto-Gram he told us last  
year about Lew Giles, said to be an NSA saboteur wrecking  
American privacy products in 1997. Schneier says that  
according to several sources Giles went from company to  
company, asking them to destroy the security of their own  
products, and arranging cover stories to protect them.  
According to Crypto-Gram sometimes Giles worked directly  
with engineers, with no managers around. The sabotage was  
always supposed to look like a mistake.  
 
At about the same time, PGP introduced "key recovery" with  
the hidden flaw recently covered worldwide, including  
Schneier's own clear description in Slashdot. Other serious  
vulnerabilities have been found in the PGP versions released  
then. For example, just last May PGP was found to generate  
weak keys on Linux and OpenBSD. The original report in  
BugTraq says the bug was introduced in version 5.0,  
released in 1997.  
 
Undoubtedly most security bugs are just bugs. But it's also  
very possible that some are backdoors.  
 
CNN and Network World detailed how the NSA openly strong  
arms companies, "leaning on software, switch and router  
vendors" to make them "add a government-approved back  
door into network gear." Companies working with the NSA,  
however unwillingly, include Netscape, Sun, and Microsoft.  
Chris Tolles of Sun says, "Everyone in Silicon Valley,  
including us, has to have specific staff -- highly paid experts -- 
 to deal with them." If everyone's dealing with them, are any  
products secure?  
 
Taher Elgamal, who wrote Netscape's so called "data- 
recovery plan" as demanded by the spooks, said they didn't  
have a choice. Exports are about half the income for these  
businesses. In practice companies need NSA's permission  
to export security products, except for "export grade" junk.  
NSA only gives permission if the security is crippled in some  
way.  
 
Duncan Campbell reported in Interception Capabilities 2000  
that NSA succeeded in compromising browsers from both  
Microsoft and Netscape, as well as Lotus Notes. The  
browsers' security was openly gutted by NSA's insistence on  
reducing key sizes to whatever the NSA can easily crack at  
the time. In the case of Lotus Notes the keys appeared to be  
longer, but just enough of each key was secretly given to the  
NSA.  
 
Mit sehr vielen Links 
http://cryptome.org/nsa-sabotage.htm  
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edited by  
published on: 2000-09-06 
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