John Gilmore On How The NSA Sabotaged A Key Security Standard

from the betrayal-of-trust dept

In Bruce Schneier's uplifting call to fix the Internet in the wake of key technologies being subverted by the US government, one of the things he asks engineers to do is to come forward with detailed information about how the NSA did that: We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do. Although not directly answering that call, EFF co-founder John Gilmore has written a fascinating short post about what he noticed happening on an IETF standards committee drawing up the important IPsec standard: NSA employees participated throughout, and occupied leadership roles in the committee and among the editors of the documents



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Every once in a while, someone not an NSA employee, but who had longstanding ties to NSA, would make a suggestion that reduced privacy or security, but which seemed to make sense when viewed by people who didn't know much about crypto.



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The resulting standard was incredibly complicated -- so complex that every real cryptographer who tried to analyze it threw up their hands and said, "We can't even begin to evaluate its security unless you simplify it radically". Needless to say, it was never simplified. Gilmore also reports what happened elsewhere: In other circumstances I also found situations where NSA employees explicitly lied to standards committees, such as that for cellphone encryption, telling them that if they merely debated an actually-secure protocol, they would be violating the export control laws unless they excluded all foreigners from the room (in an international standards committee!). Of course, this remains at the anecdotal level. But if Schneier gets his 50 NSA stories, we should start to have a much clearer picture of what the agency has been up to -- and how to stop it happening in the future.

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Filed Under: backdoors, encryption, ietf, john gilmore, nsa, sabotage, standards, surveillance