NSA Paid Encryption S/W Company To Place NSA Back Door

From Juan Cole at Informed Comment (whose site has a spiffy-looking redesign):

NSA bribed Encryption Companies to Install Back Doors: Was the Law Broken? Did Obama Know?

(By Juan Cole)

Reuters gets the scoop: the National Security Agency gave internet security firm RSA some $10 million to use an NSA encryption formula in its BSafe software. RSA is now a subsidiary of the EMC corporation, and they have urged customers not to use BSafe since the revelations by Edward Snowden made clear that the NSA’s formula in fact allowed the agency access to all the information supposedly encrypted with it.

This story should be a huge scandal, but I fear it won’t be. This is like the FDA paying a pharmaceutical company to carry a drug that does not work and could therefore leave patients open to dying from an untreated illness after taking medication they are assured will cure it. ...

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The "bribe" (Cole's word, not mine) was immense, and amounted to ⅓ of RSA's corporate income last year. I cannot imagine for a moment that their personnel did not know about the back door, or that Obama was not informed of it. IMHO, this is NSA's worst transgression yet, and if Obama knew about the payoff (or, Dog forbid, secretly authorized it), he is guilty of a criminal act. Even absent his complicity, this is some serious shit.

One question remains: will RSA rename the s/w "BSorry"?


 

NIST: Drop Use Of Our (NSA-Influenced) Encryption Standard

Jeff Larson and Justin Elliott of Pro Publica:

Following revelations about the NSA’s covert influence on computer security standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, announced earlier this week it is revisiting some of its encryption standards.

But in a little-noticed footnote, NIST went a step further, saying it is “strongly” recommending against even using one of the standards. The institute sets standards for everything from the time to weights to computer security that are used by the government and widely adopted by industry.

As ProPublica, the New York Times, and the Guardian reported last week, documents provided by Edward Snowden suggest that the NSA has heavily influenced the standard, which has been used around the world.

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Everything you thought was secret...