Danny reports “the always excellent c’t magazine analyses the hypotheticals of the Dutch IP-surveillance scandal:
According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel. …”
Yikes. You’d think they’d have learnt from Ireland’s mistakes…. this article (update: moved to here) reports that massive back-door use by a third-party government occurred before in similar circumstances, during the Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1985.
For those of you who don’t know, these discussions were between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, and took place in London.
In order to allow the negotiating team to contact their government and civil service securely, a million-pound cryptographic system had been bought in order to secure the link between the Irish Embassy in London and the government in Dublin.
Unfortunately, this equipment was thoroughly compromised.
It turns out that the Swiss company from which the equipment was bought, namely Crypto AG, had cooperated with the NSA and the BND (the NSA’s German equivalent), to allow them to decipher the traffic trivially. (Judging from the snippet from another article below, sounds like this was done using a known-plaintext attack).
The NSA routinely monitored and deciphered the Irish diplomatic messages. All it took then was for the UK’s NSA equivalent, GCHQ, to pull some strings, and the UK government had a distinct advantage in the negotiations from then on.
Another source for details on Crypto AG’s breakage is Der Spiegel, issue 36/96, pages 206-207. Here’s some snippets:
The secret man (sic) have obviously a great interest to direct the trading of encryption devices into ordered tracks. … A former employee of Crypto AG reported that he had to coordinate his developments with “people from Bad Godesberg”. This was the residence of the “central office for encryption affairs” of the BND, and the service instructed Crypto AG what algorithms to use to create the codes.
Members of the American secret service National Security Agency (NSA) also visited the Crypto AG often. The memorandum of the secret workshop of the Crypto AG in August 1975 on the occasion of the demonstration of a new prototype of an encryption device mentions as a participant the cryptographer of the NSA, Nora Mackebee. …
Depending on the projected usage area the manipulation on the cryptographic devices were more or less subtle, said Polzer. Some buyers only got simplified code technology according to the motto “for these customers that is sufficient, they don’t not need such a good stuff.”
In more delicate cases the specialists reached deeper into the cryptographic trick box: The machines prepared in this way enriched the encrypted text with “auxiliary informations” that allowed all who knew this addition to reconstruct the original key. The result was the same: What looked like inpenetrateable secret code to the users of the Crypto-machines, who acted in good faith, was readable with not more than a finger exercise for the informed listener.
So what’s the bottom line? Use GPG! ;)