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22 December 2013 NSA Kills RSA
http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2013-December/019112.html
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2013 10:17:31 +0300 On 21/12/13 20:59 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 1:37 AM, ianG <iang[at]iang.org I doubt that too, although there are reports that this sort of thing happened elsewhere. What is clear is that the team did their research and figured out who would be open to such things. RSA was vulnerable, we know the channel and motives: money, business decisions, weakened core crypto team. Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: The deal was reported at the time, I heard it as 'NSA pays RSA $10 I heard it as "and we especially want the DUAL_EC to be the default RNG". That is, it was an actual request, and it was part of the contract discussions. Now, the thing to realise is that this is benign from RSA's pov, but only seemingly benign from NSA's pov. This is how it is done -- an unauditable, unverifiable, benign, totally reasonable shift. ... Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: But the point I want to make here is we need to avoid accusing people of being in league with the devil when all they actually did was not ask the right questions or enough questions. Absolutely, we need to separate the people from the problem. Old Dutch expression: go soft on the people, go hard on the problem. Nobody needs to accuse the RSA folk of being evil. Nor should we accuse the NSA of being stupid, and to say they wouldn't do such things is simple ignorance. The NSA are very smart. They know how to figure out the openings, what is possible. They know how to convince someone who wants to be convinced. $10m makes someone want to be convinced. As I seem to be saying a lot, *it is their job* ! The NSA are spies, after all, and they're very good at it. If this doesn't make any sense, read more spy novels -- there is a common thread, *the asset always loses*. So what about RSA? One could say that RSA were naive, or innocent, or tricked. It can happen to all of us. But, RSA didn't make one small mistake, they made two huge mistakes. What was RSA's job? Their job was to serve their customers with secure crypto. They didn't, instead, they allowed an interested party to get between them and the customers, which was an abrogation of their self-claimed standard: "Unlike alternatives such as open source, our technology is backed by highly regarded cryptographic experts." This mistake is not like (say) an airline being tricked into revealing their customer list or a phone company being tricked into letting someone tap their fibres. An airline flies people in planes, a phone company delivers calls, they aren't in the privacy business. This is like an airline dropping maintenance, and putting planes into mountains. RSA was in the crypto business -- it shipped dodgy crypto. They made the one mistake that is impossible to argue away: Negligence in the core business. It's still just one mistake. Where RSA made their second mistake [0], and crossed into gross negligence was when all the warnings came out (2007, Microsoft), and *RSA did nothing* . It's all over. For the sake of the entire crypto business, RSA must be blacklisted. Every provider must be taught that breaking trust in core business with customers is unacceptable. And, don't blame me for this rationale. The NSA must be taught that if they wish to pervert a supplier, the responsibility for its failure must come back to the NSA. The NSA brought RSA down. Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: NSA recruitment is already down by a third. I suspect their technical Yup. And no doubt RSA sales are down a long way. On this dire thread, this is a termination event; if I was boss at EMC I'd be looking at breaking up the division, selling it. At a minimum, re-branding it and cleaning out the staff. All this at NSA's door. Who think it is fine to destroy their own country's industry to get a leg-up on a bunch of net cowboys and towelheads. And they still aren't taking it seriously, still saying they are doing god's work, protecting Americans from idiots with firecrackers, to paraphrase that Wall Streeter. Strange bunch of people. iang [0] http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001447.html
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2013 08:52:18 -0500 On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 2:17 AM, ianG <iang[at]iang.org> wrote: [Snip message above] The job of the NSA was to make America safe. They have not been doing that job at all. Over the past twenty years the industrialized world has become dependent on the net as a critical infrastructure. Without power and water it is not possible to live in the urban population densities we live in today. Without the net there is no food on the shelves of the supermarkets. Instead of eliminating the vulnerabilities in the critical infrastructure, the NSA has worked to make them bigger and create new ones. The civil industry can't work with the agency that is meant to be working on the same problems. The NSA has completely destroyed the trust that was established. I find it very hard to see who is going to be joining the NSA now. It used to be that they were the only game in town if you wanted to do crypto. Then they became a place where you would get paid rather less than in industry but get to work with the best people and emerge with a stellar resume. Now they are a place where you will be paid less than in the commercial crypto world, you will be considered a pariah in your local community and your resume will be toxic afterwards. The NSA has become the crypto world equivalent of Fox 'News': once you work there you can't work anywhere else in the industry. iang: No the lesson is that nobody works with the NSA. If the US government wants to do anything to protect the country against cyber attack they are going to have to set up a civil run, civil led organization to do the work --
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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