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"I'm honestly surprised when people say they didn't know or expect this was happening." Then you must not have much experience with people in the academic cryp

"I'm honestly surprised when people say they didn't know or expect this was happening." Then you must not have much experience with people in the academic crypto community. Most people assumed that the NSA was engaged in wiretapping activity, but BULLRUN was a big shock. People generally assumed that information assurance was at least as important to the NSA as signals intelligence and pointed to things like DES (which the NSA strengthened) as evidence. The idea that the NSA was deliberately subverting crypto and security software, including software that vast swaths of the US government uses, was considered to be an out-there conspiracy theory. So while I think the author is a little extreme in saying that this is beyond what conspiracy theorists imagined, it is not wrong to say that people in the academic community were surprised. You can look at what people said on the cryptography mailing list and in sci.crypt prior to these revelations if you do not believe me.

001sky 13y ago
including software that vast swaths of the US government uses This always ceases to amaze me
- unimpressive 13y ago
  Are you sure you don't mean never ceases to amaze me?
  - ScottBurson 13y ago
    He means he could care less.
mpyne 13y ago
> Most people assumed that the NSA was engaged in wiretapping activity, but BULLRUN was a big shock. People generally assumed that information assurance was at least as important to the NSA as signals intelligence and pointed to things like DES (which the NSA strengthened) as evidence. Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of messages? That makes no sense whatsoever; NSA has been breaking codes (not merely wiretapping) since NSA has been around, just like it has long been an open secret (if unacknowledged publically) that NSA hacks into specific systems if they can. It is true that COMSEC is a core function of NSA, but that is not inconsistent with NSA performing targeted SIGINT or general cryptanalysis. If their codebreakers can break into equipment used by the US government or major commercial interests then so can foreign entities, and therefore NSA needs to try anyways, even if we're talking about "pure" information assurance. Likewise the history of NSA has shown them before to be willing to give people cryptosystems that are strong against everyone but the NSA. That's also in keeping with NSA's drive for COMSEC, since (from their POV) they won't be needlessly decrypting 'innocent' information anyways. So I'm not saying you're wrong about what the academic community was assuming, but I am saying I can't imagine why the academic community was so naïve. Indeed, I thought the ever-present distrust of NSA was exactly why they looked for backdoors in things like Dual_EC_DRBG, and used "nothing up my sleeve" constants in algorithms designed in academia.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > "Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of messages?" Consider this exchange on HN nearly three years ago: @moe: I had always considered the Clipper-Chip incident to hint at the tip of an iceberg. Do you really think that was an isolated one-time event? @kgo: The Clipper Chip was introduced in the open. They tried to push it through legislation. It's not like the NSA blackmailed Intel executives to include the capabilities secretly in their Pentium Processors without notifying their customers. Same with the new proposed legislation. But all that demonstrates is that the NSA has an interest in being able to (legally) monitor encrypted communications. Which everyone already knows. If someone had 'busted' the NSA trying to do something sneaky and/or covert and/or illegal, then you could argue that it's the tip of some iceberg of nefarious activity. But like I said this was all done out in the open. You might as well say that because we know the FBI wiretaps phones through legally obtained court orders, that's the tip of the iceberg that points to millions of illegal wiretaps. It's a bad inference. (I would emphasis certain parts of kgo's response that I find particularly... accidentally prescient?... but the result would just be me emphasizing the whole damn thing...) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456 The gist here is that Clipper, being a public effort to subvert encryption, should not be seen as evidence that the NSA was interested in non-public subversion of security. Was this naive? In retrospect? Obviously. At the time? Arguably. Where people, who reasonably should have been informed, caught off guard by the revelations brought to us by Snowden? You betcha. [edited for formatting]
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Thanks for the quote, it's quite illuminating. This is actually essentially what I was arguing, not just moe's point: But all that demonstrates is that the NSA has an interest in being able to (legally) monitor encrypted communications. Which everyone already knows. I don't condone designing backdoors into products. Maybe I can research into BULLRUN more but the impression I had was that the intention was to subvert crypto in a way that only NSA could use (either via escrow or constants-up-their-sleeve), perhaps to take advantage of exploits that happened to get shipped to the commercial sector, but not to design broken gear that anyone could subvert if they know the secret handshake. Obviously even this is sneaky and shady as can be, but that goes with the territory (though @kgo would seem to agree that it's nefarious :-D). But even assuming malice here, I'd have said even at the time, with the ongoing changes to communication patterns across the world, that there's simply no way you can assume NSA isn't trying to hack everything they can. When I was reading Schneier a decade or more ago they were the very definition of Mallory, and nothing has changed on that since. But I suppose you're right, that people at the time weren't seeing NSA the same way I was.

001sky 13y ago

including software that vast swaths of the US government uses This always ceases to amaze me

unimpressive 13y ago
Are you sure you don't mean never ceases to amaze me?
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  He means he could care less.

mpyne 13y ago

> Most people assumed that the NSA was engaged in wiretapping activity, but BULLRUN was a big shock. People generally assumed that information assurance was at least as important to the NSA as signals intelligence and pointed to things like DES (which the NSA strengthened) as evidence. Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of messages? That makes no sense whatsoever; NSA has been breaking codes (not merely wiretapping) since NSA has been around, just like it has long been an open secret (if unacknowledged publically) that NSA hacks into specific systems if they can. It is true that COMSEC is a core function of NSA, but that is not inconsistent with NSA performing targeted SIGINT or general cryptanalysis. If their codebreakers can break into equipment used by the US government or major commercial interests then so can foreign entities, and therefore NSA needs to try anyways, even if we're talking about "pure" information assurance. Likewise the history of NSA has shown them before to be willing to give people cryptosystems that are strong against everyone but the NSA. That's also in keeping with NSA's drive for COMSEC, since (from their POV) they won't be needlessly decrypting 'innocent' information anyways. So I'm not saying you're wrong about what the academic community was assuming, but I am saying I can't imagine why the academic community was so naïve. Indeed, I thought the ever-present distrust of NSA was exactly why they looked for backdoors in things like Dual_EC_DRBG, and used "nothing up my sleeve" constants in algorithms designed in academia.

jlgreco 13y ago
> "Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of messages?" Consider this exchange on HN nearly three years ago: @moe: I had always considered the Clipper-Chip incident to hint at the tip of an iceberg. Do you really think that was an isolated one-time event? @kgo: The Clipper Chip was introduced in the open. They tried to push it through legislation. It's not like the NSA blackmailed Intel executives to include the capabilities secretly in their Pentium Processors without notifying their customers. Same with the new proposed legislation. But all that demonstrates is that the NSA has an interest in being able to (legally) monitor encrypted communications. Which everyone already knows. If someone had 'busted' the NSA trying to do something sneaky and/or covert and/or illegal, then you could argue that it's the tip of some iceberg of nefarious activity. But like I said this was all done out in the open. You might as well say that because we know the FBI wiretaps phones through legally obtained court orders, that's the tip of the iceberg that points to millions of illegal wiretaps. It's a bad inference. (I would emphasis certain parts of kgo's response that I find particularly... accidentally prescient?... but the result would just be me emphasizing the whole damn thing...) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456 The gist here is that Clipper, being a public effort to subvert encryption, should not be seen as evidence that the NSA was interested in non-public subversion of security. Was this naive? In retrospect? Obviously. At the time? Arguably. Where people, who reasonably should have been informed, caught off guard by the revelations brought to us by Snowden? You betcha. [edited for formatting]
- mpyne 13y ago
  Thanks for the quote, it's quite illuminating. This is actually essentially what I was arguing, not just moe's point: But all that demonstrates is that the NSA has an interest in being able to (legally) monitor encrypted communications. Which everyone already knows. I don't condone designing backdoors into products. Maybe I can research into BULLRUN more but the impression I had was that the intention was to subvert crypto in a way that only NSA could use (either via escrow or constants-up-their-sleeve), perhaps to take advantage of exploits that happened to get shipped to the commercial sector, but not to design broken gear that anyone could subvert if they know the secret handshake. Obviously even this is sneaky and shady as can be, but that goes with the territory (though @kgo would seem to agree that it's nefarious :-D). But even assuming malice here, I'd have said even at the time, with the ongoing changes to communication patterns across the world, that there's simply no way you can assume NSA isn't trying to hack everything they can. When I was reading Schneier a decade or more ago they were the very definition of Mallory, and nothing has changed on that since. But I suppose you're right, that people at the time weren't seeing NSA the same way I was.