A brief history of NSA backdoors. (2013)
12 days ago
- #Cryptography
- #NSA
- #Backdoors
- The British and US governments sold compromised Enigma machines post-WW2 to allies and former colonies, enabling espionage for decades.
- The 'Boris Project' involved weakening Crypto AG ciphers for NSA access to NATO communications, continuing possibly to the present.
- DES was altered by the NSA to reduce key size, making brute force attacks feasible.
- The Clipper Chip, proposed in 1993, was a publicly acknowledged backdoor for voice communications, but was never widely adopted.
- Lotus Notes was weakened at the NSA's request, compromising documents and emails globally.
- Actel ProASIC3 FPGAs were found to contain a deliberate backdoor, used in critical US systems.
- Dual_EC_DRBG, a random number generator, was backdoored by the NSA and promoted as a standard.
- The NSA's SIGINT project aimed to backdoor encryption chips, with Cavium CPUs identified as compromised.
- Trusted Computing Platforms were targeted by the NSA for exploitation, raising concerns in Germany.
- The NSA intercepted and implanted backdoors in computer equipment during transit, targeting airgapped networks.