As this is from 2016 it doesn't include this new fun revelation:
> On 11 February 2020, The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF revealed that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence, and the spy agencies could easily break the codes used to send encrypted messages.
This is an epically cool blog post! - submit it to HN on its own merits.
This was of particular interest to me:
>>>"...1986 Reagan tipped off the Libyans that the US could decrypt their communications by talking about information he could only get through Libya decrypts on TV15. In 1991 the Iranians learned that the NSA could break their diplomatic communications when transcripts of Iranian diplomatic communications ended up in a French court case..."
Because, in 1986 - thats effectively when a lot of the phreaking and social engineering was at a peak - Cyberpunk was moving from imagination --> zeitgeist --> reality.
Social engineering and line-printer litter recovery were yielding the backdoors into the Telecom Switching system. BBS's were raging [0].
So when you get a gaph-guffaw look into infosec in a slipup like these ones, it reinforces in mind that the 80s were some really wild times all around as technology tsunami'd from people's minds business and reality.
> I wrote blog entry on this subject with a very similar name [0] which covers the CryptoAG story in more detail. It doesn't have the 2020 news.
[0]: A Brief History of NSA Backdoors (2013), https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/12/index.html
Wow this is super interesting I noticed this paragraph in the text.
> 2013, Enabling for Encryption Chips: In the NSA's budget request documents released by Edward Snowden, one of the goals of the NSA's SIGINT project is to fully backdoor or "enable" certain encryption chips by the end of 201311. It is not publicly known to which encryption chips they are referring.
From what I know Cavium is one of these "SIGINT enabled" chip manufactures.
>> "While working on documents in the Snowden archive the thesis author learned that an American fabless semiconductor CPU vendor named Cavium is listed as a successful SIGINT "enabled" CPU vendor. By chance this was the same CPU present in the thesis author's Internet router (UniFi USG3). The entire Snowden archive should be open for academic researchers to better understand more of the history of such behavior." (page 71, note 21)
> The company had about 230 employees, had offices in Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Muscat, Selsdon and Steinhausen, and did business throughout the world.
That's a... really strange list of office locations, especially considering the relatively small number of employees.
> The owners of Crypto AG were unknown, supposedly even to the managers of the firm, and they held their ownership through bearer shares.
How does this work in practice? If management doesn't know who owns the company, how can the owners exercise influence on company business?
How does that representative prove that they really represent the owners, if the owners aren't known to management? How can they authorize someone without revealing identifying information?
Proton Mail's extremely bureaucratic operational deafness, and their glacial pace of product features and open-sourcing, would certainly lend support to that idea.
I actually wish this was true. I want an email service that would last forever and is secure enough from my threats, namely security breaches of the email host and account takeover from non state actors.
Gmail is close enough, but I want an alternative. An email service run by the nsa or the cia would be great.
Considering that I remember reading the CIA’s own historical document on this operation, I would guess its usefulness had run its course. If I’m not mistaken, it was the CIA who released the document to journalists; it seemed like bragging.
To add another dimension to this, personally i think that the Crypto AG relationship is what is referred to as "HISTORY" in this leaked NSA ECI codenames list.
> On 11 February 2020, The Washington Post, ZDF and SRF revealed that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence, and the spy agencies could easily break the codes used to send encrypted messages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG