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| Crypto bombshell |
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| MadTux:
Apparently the son of the company founder got murdered, because he wanted to talk: https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/news/story/Ermordete-Geheimdienst-Sohn-von-Crypto-Gruender--28113650 Reminds me of Tron, the hacker, who got epsteined in 1998, because he developed an open source voice encryption device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker) Had symmetric crypto at first, but AFAIK he later wanted to add assymetric crypto, so you could basically talk to anyone without sharing secret keys. Guess CIA/NSA/BND didn't like that. |
| peter-h:
That's been easily possible for many years, with VOIP. One problem is that it is easy to find out who the two ends of the call are, usually... because VOIP uses end to end UDP. It could be passed through intermediate servers but you never know if they are compromised, and any real time traffic (like voice) is obvious in traffic analysis. You would be amazed how people go to some lengths to obfuscate themselves, with stuff like the TOR browser, and then make really basic mistakes. A classic one is you are up to something nefarious, in a hotel, on 4G, thinking 4G is ok, and then you walk away from the window, lose the signal, and the phone connects to the hotel wifi, on which you were a few days earlier, with another device, when connecting to the site which you are trying to wind up :) Be assured that if you properly p1ss somebody off, they will find those details in their server logs ;) A part of my day job is looking after a site which gets this fairly regularly (sock puppets etc). Many years ago, with the EFF in the US getting going, "everybody" was getting into PGP etc. I was one of the earliest users of it. Today almost nobody bothers because almost nobody cares if the NSA can read the stuff. And if the UK GCHQ cannot read my emails I would consider them not delivering value for my taxpayer money :) Switzerland is a funny place. Start a conversation about nazi gold in their bank vaults and see what reception you get :) Crypto is fascinating, and equally so in how people screw up by doing simple things. Read up on VENONA and the duplicated one time pads, for a classic. Top secret until c. 1987. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: daqq on February 13, 2020, 12:49:37 pm ---edy: There is actually an unbreakable encryption: XOR your data against a random data. Problem is the exchange of the random data :) If you exchange a 16TB drive filled with random data with your counterpart you wish to talk with, you are safe to send 16TB. After that it gets tricky :) --- End quote --- The first digital voice scrambler, SIGSALY, used random data as a one-time-pad, originated from analog noise, turned into digital values, then recorded as frequency-shift-keyed analog on giant phonograph records. The turntables at each end were super-precise, synched machines that ensured both sides played within something like 1ms of each other, for the whole duration of the record (12 minutes). They pressed only two copies of each record, then destroyed the master. One copy was sent to each endpoint. After use, the record was destroyed. During WW2, over 3000 calls were placed with SIGSALY, meaning that at absolute minimum, 6000 pairs of records were needed (since it was full-duplex), and in reality probably a lot more, as some calls would have been long enough to require multiple sets of records. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY |
| peter-h:
I bet SIGSALY was leaking the key, but in WW2 they didn't have the DSP technology to extract it. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: peter-h on February 13, 2020, 06:29:05 pm ---I bet SIGSALY was leaking the key, but in WW2 they didn't have the DSP technology to extract it. --- End quote --- How do you figure? It used a one-time pad with a key taken from an analog noise source. The key was as long as the data it encrypted. |
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