Hasty Briefsbeta

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.