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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:03AM   Printer-friendly
from the put-all-your-secrets-in-one-basket dept.

'The intelligence coup of the century'

In case of paywall...
CIA Secretly Owned Crypto, the Swiss Company That Ruled Global Spy Comms for Decades, Says Report

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

For the most goodest security, use only one commercial crypto system. Trust it with all your secrets.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Bot on Wednesday February 12 2020, @03:40PM (1 child)

    by Bot (3902) on Wednesday February 12 2020, @03:40PM (#957207) Journal

    guys... the world is full of one time pads, whose downloading will never raise any red flag, who are already mirrored and distributed in the whole planet, who are already compressed so devoid of harmful repetitions, who can be used together with a hash function and a password with simple programs that do not need to be coded by a crypto superstar. A savy enough guy could even code the decoder on the fly in ram on a airgapped pc and leave literally no trace.

    Those one time pads are called: linux software packages and updates. Yes, the .deb your updater has already verified cryptographically for security purposes.

    Any innocent widely distributed info can become a one time pad, you secure it by hashing and salting.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:52PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:52PM (#957420)

    Any innocent widely distributed info can become a one time pad, you secure it by hashing and salting.

    All too true, and all it takes is a $5 wrench to get the secret anyway - regardless of the theoretical unbreakability of the algorithm.

    The best cryptography is cryptography that nobody recognizes as such - such as (successful) steganography.

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