22 ms·

It’s worth reading Ray Ozzie’s (Lotus Notes creator)’s comment on this from a HN 2013 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 https://news.yco

• ethbr1 3y ago
  For people younger than ~37, I'd remind them that crypto before 2000, especially in shipped commercial products, was playing under substantially different government restrictions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars Effectively and in short, you were prohibited by the US government from shipping strong encryption in any internationally distributed product. Which generally meant everything commercial. Despite open source implementations of strong encryption existing (e.g. PGP et al.). Now, no one bats an eye if you ship the most secure crypto you want. Then, it was a coin flip as to whether you'd feel the full weight of the US government legal apparatus. It was a crazy, schizophrenic time.
  • bo1024 3y ago
    > It was a crazy, schizophrenic time. Or, we are currently experiencing a brief oasis of freedom in between extended periods of encryption lockdowns and controls.
    • Jerrrry 3y ago
      Yup, networks with a neuron count above a certain threshold (2+T?) will likely be on the IDAR restriction list again.
      • SkyMarshal 3y ago
        What’s a neuron count?
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • bagels 3y ago
          Neuron in a neural network. Not sure if the parent is talking about models, software or hardware though.
      • bagels 3y ago
        ITAR? Also, was there a time where there was a restriction based on neuron count?
  • brudgers 3y ago
    Now, no one bats an eye if you ship the most secure crypto you want. To me, there are only two plausible explanations for the change: 1. The three letter agencies gave up on backdooring cryptography. 2. The three letter agencies successfully subverted the entire chain of trust. Only one of them is consistent with a workforce consisting of highly motivated codebreaking professionals available working for many decades with virtually unlimited resources and minimal oversight. The other is what people want to believe. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
    • lern_too_spel 3y ago
      Only one is consistent with the documents that have been leaked since the change to export restrictions. The other is what the marketing department at Reynolds Wrap would like you to believe.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      IMHO, the IC gave up on the feasibility of maintaining hegemony over encryption, particularly in the face of non-corporate open source. You can't sue a book / t-shirt / anonymous contributors. Consequently, they still have highly motivated and talented cryptanalysts and vast resources, but they're attacking widely-deployed academically-sound crypto systems. Hypothetical encryption-breaking machines (e.g. large quantum computers) are too obviously a double-edged sword: who else has one? And given that possibility, wouldn't you switch to algorithms more secure against them? In reality, the NSA's preference would likely be that no-such machine exists, but rather there are brute-force attacks that require incredibly large and expensive amounts of computational resources. Because if it's just a money problem, the US can feel more confident that they're near the top of the pile. Which probably means that their most efficient target has shifted from mathematical forced decryption to implementation attacks. Even the strongest safe has a weakest point. Which may still be strong, but is the best option if you need to get in.
      • deleted 3y ago
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  • matheusmoreira 3y ago
    > It was a crazy, schizophrenic time. Still is. To this day, we have to debate and justify ourselves to these people. They make us look like pedophiles for caring about this stuff. They just won't give up, they keep trying to pass these silly laws again and again. It's just a tiresome never ending struggle. And that's in the US which is relatively good about this. Judges in my country were literally foaming at the mouth with rage when WhatsApp told them they couldn't provide decryption keys. Blocked the entire service for days out of spite, impacting hundreds of millions.
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    • a1369209993 3y ago
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      • tasty_freeze 3y ago
        I down-voted this and I'll say why. I'm pretty dang liberal in my politics; my push back isn't because I'm carrying water for right wing groups. Q-Anon is a current right wing conspiracy group that claims powerful democrats are trafficking children, the "we must protect our kids from XYZ" justification crosses political lines. But they aren't alone. Back in the 90s there were a few years of "the satanic panic", where there were wild claims made about daycare centers doing unspeakable things to children, things that beggar belief just from a logistical perspective. People spent years in prison over this. There was no whiff then of it being a conservative cause -- it mixed the usual conspiracy theory dynamics along with the Christian moral panic dynamics. Back in the 80s Tipper Gore, wife of then senator Al Gore, drove a campaign to label and censor music to "protect the children." eg, children were coached into giving answers and making up scenarios. for instance, one child claimed that they were taken in an airplane and flown to a secret location with clowns and sex, then flown back to the class in time for their 2pm pickup. Stories about ritual animal sacrifice in their daycare room, stories about children being murdered even though none were reported missing.
  • r3trohack3r 3y ago
    IIRC this is part of what shifted hardware manufacturing out of the US. If you wanted to build in the U.S. you had to produce two versions of your product, one with “full encryption” and one with encryption hobbled. Or you could go build one version somewhere else and import it into the U.S.
    • archgoon 3y ago
      I had never heard of this particular aspect of demanufacturing, that's fascinating. Do you know of any products where this was a deciding factor, or at least a major consideration? (I recognize you probably can't easily cite internal corporate documents)
    • mike50 3y ago
      Similar situation with space hardware. Even cots memory chips hardened for radiation and space are ITAR export restricted.
      • stephen_g 3y ago
        Yeah, I worked at a company up to a few years ago where it was actually a huge competitive advantage for us not being in the US, because the products we designed, manufactured and sold (full satcom terminals as well as the microwave converters in them) would have been ITAR if they came from the US (being ‘dual use’).
  • snakeyjake 3y ago
    Windows 2000 came on a CD... and a floppy disk. The CD was a globally-legal image, and export-controlled strong crypto came on the floppy in countries where it was allowed. https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-2000-high-encryption/win2000 https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-2000-high-encryption/...
    • LeifCarrotson 3y ago
      How hard would it have been for a "rogue state" to get a copy of that floppy? I understand that times were different, you couldn't just PGP encrypt it and attach a 1.44 MB blob to an email, sending it at 24 kbps. You couldn't just upload it to an anonymous filesharing site. But today it seems fundamentally obvious that once a single copy is leaked, it's all over... was that not true in 2000?
      • wmf 3y ago
        Of course all that stuff was leaked (and there were anonymous filesharing sites). The whole export-grade crypto thing was a legal fig leaf.
        • pdw 3y ago
          It was all extremely silly. Debian took a different approach: before 2005, they put all crypto packages in a separate "non-US" archive, hosted in the Netherlands. American developers weren't allowed to upload there. That way, Debian never exported crypto code from the United States, it only ever imported it.
          • wmf 3y ago
            Yep, US export restrictions ended up spurring foreign investment in crypto like Thawte (founded by Mark Shuttleworth) and SSLeay (later forked as OpenSSL).
          • sillywalk 3y ago
            I believe OpenBSD (based in Canada) was in a similar situation.
  • hinkley 3y ago
    Except to Iran, Syria, North Korea… Also you couldn’t just ship products with a spot where crypto went and remove the crypto. API designs had to go through mental gymnastics to allow crypto without explicitly adding crypto. Which is why you have odd constructs that take strings as arguments and give you encryption back. Sometimes. And since new languages copy patterns from old to remain familiar, these APIs are still frequently some of the most patience-testing.
  • UI_at_80x24 3y ago
    For anybody who hasn't already read it, I highly recommend the book: "Crypto" by Steven Levy. I was 30% of my way through the book before I started recognizing real world events, news stories, whispered computer secrets; and realized that it wasn't a fictional book and was instead talking about real history. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984428.Crypto?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4FYEGuLV2S&rank=6 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984428.Crypto?from_searc...
    • hkt 3y ago
      Fabulous book, I found it in a public library when I was 15 or so and it was a hell of an education. Not least because I was already reading about tor and i2p. I'd recommend it to anyone - the story about Phil Zimmerman printing the code to PGP in a book made me laugh my head off.
  • pkaye 3y ago
    Not just US but other countries had their own restrictions. For example I think France didn't allow anything better than 40-bit encryption without key escrow. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9805/19/encryption/index.html http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9805/19/encryption/index.h... http://www.opengroup.org/security/meetings/apr98/french-regulation.pdf http://www.opengroup.org/security/meetings/apr98/french-regu...
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    It's not completely gone. If you implement crypto in an iOS app you have to get an "export license" even if you're not based in the US or publish your app there.
    • fullspectrumdev 3y ago
      I’ve had to sign ITAR related paperwork a few times for commercial software specifically because it was made in the US and being “exported” to the UK. Really boils my piss given a lot of it, upon inspection, just used OpenSSL under the hood.
      • brokenmachine 3y ago
        I'm in Australia and had to sign ITAR paperwork to order a bluetooth evaluation board.
  • forgetfreeman 3y ago
    That this is no longer the case is a fairly strong indication that The Powers That Be have durably resolved the issue of decryption.
  • convolvatron 3y ago
    and I believe it was a major contributor to us having poor infrastructure for PKI protocols today, since these restrictions meant that it was pointless to try to bake them into standards
  • rozzie 3y ago
    "Now, no one bats an eye if you ship the most secure crypto you want." The most surprising thing to me is that, in speaking in the past several years with younger entrepreneurs, they're not even aware of the obligation to file for an export license for any/all software containing crypto (such as that submitted to the App Store). I've not yet seen a case in which a mass market exemption isn't quickly granted, but devs still need to file - and re-file annually.
    • justinclift 3y ago
      Is that still a requirement for US developers? As in, currently.
      • lstamour 3y ago
        When you submit the documentation via Apple, also submitting it to the government is not necessary: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying_with_encryption_export_regulations https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying... Essentially Apple built a system so you have to agree to export restrictions with every single build you upload to Apple.
  • hoc 3y ago
    Well... some folks still do care. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying_with_encryption_export_regulations https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying... Also, always makes you wonder, why the standards the OS ships with are exempt...
• CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  An ex Microsoft dev did a good breakdown video of NSAkey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjkBAl84PJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjkBAl84PJs
• 13of40 3y ago
  It was an interesting time. I forget the person's name, but I talked briefly with the guy who implemented the crc32 and encryption algorithms for ZIP, and he (almost apologetically) said the encryption was designed to be exportable under those laws. It's still not trivial to break, but you can test millions of passwords on a ZIP archive entry in the time it takes to try one on a modern Office document.
  • fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    Partial known plaintext attacks are very, very useful when cracking ZIP “encryption”. I’ve mostly used this to unpack ZyXEL firmware updates (reference below to this), but it also works on a lot of other stuff if you can get a partial plaintext. Some file formats headers might work. https://www.fullspectrum.dev/the-hunt-for-cve-2023-28771-part-1/ https://www.fullspectrum.dev/the-hunt-for-cve-2023-28771-par...
• grammers 3y ago
  Whether secret or not, it was a backdoor that could be/was exploited. Today governments are asking for 'secret backdoors' from tech companies, not seeing the immense risks. Crazy times.
• thewanderer1983 3y ago
  >This was not a secret back door. It was compliance with export controls everybody in the industry dealt with. The author states it correctly. Here is the text from the author "The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then only have the small matter of brute-forcing the remaining 40 bits to get the plaintext" Here is the text from the RSA conference. Hello, 1st off please don't publish my name on your site. I'm too lazy to set up another cheezy mail acct. Today I downloaded cryptography/nsa/lotus.notes.backdoor.txt from your site. I have a close friend who is a developer for Iris (the people who make Notes for lotus.) I sent him the file I downloaded and asked him what the deal was, and here's his response: Here's the necessary info to truly understand the issue here; a speech by Ray Ozzie and Charlie Kaufman's white paper on the topic. What it comes down to is that notes provides superior exportable encryption technology when compared to other US products on the market. For anyone (but the NSA) to crack our international encryption keys they must crack a 64 bit key, the same as with a US encryption key. In the international version we take 24 of the 64 bit encryption key and encrypt the 24 bits with the NSA's public key and send it, encrypted strongly, along with the encrypted message. This means the NSA can decrypt with their key and have 24 of the 64 bit key. They still have to break the remaining 40 bits. 40 bit key encryption has been the max for exportable encryption and that is what all other US exportable encryption providers allow. That limit has just been raised to 56 bits and we are incorporating that as I type. In the worst case: the NSA's private key is compromised, the 40 bit portion of the key still must be cracked. So we haven't weakened the security of international encryption, but actually made it equal to the US security (to everyone but the NSA). We are proud of this arrangement because we have found a way to make Notes as secure as the US government will allow for our international customers. If we hadn't used this technique all of the international notes encrypted data would be with only a 40 bit key. As it stands, the 64 bit key used in both US and international encryption is extremely secure. It's too bad the author of this article choose to attack Lotus Notes without considering the options the US government provides. We could have just shipped 40 bit encryption like MS, Netscape, etc. and leave our international customers with weak encryption but we didn't. Oh well, you can't make everyone understand, this confusing and frustrating stuff. I hope this helps.
• gadders 3y ago
  None of this was secret. I worked at Lotus in the mid-90s and there were 2 versions of Lotus Notes, one for the US and the other labelled "International".