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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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:45PM (4 children)
Note however that compression before encryption has been used to break encryption, in a web context where the attacker could add known content to the plaintext. The trick being that the compression got better if the injected text matched parts of the unknown text, and the size could be determined from the ciphertext.
BTW, an idea for cases where a doubling of size does not matter: Generate a one-time pad (using true randomness), encrypt the message with the one-time pad, then encrypt the one-time pad with one standard algorithm/key, and the OTP-encrypted message with another standard algorithm/key. The total key consists of the two keys, and the total encrypted message of the two individually encrypted parts.
This way, you need to break both standard algorithms to get at the information (breaking either one without breaking the other just gives you noise uncorrelated to the message), and the plaintext for each of them is just random noise, so no assumptions about the plaintext can be made on breaking either of the standard algorithms.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:17PM (1 child)
1. Compress plaintext
2. Prefix compressed binary with, say, four bytes of length
3. Suffix (length + compressed block) out to some other random length
4. XOR pad with pseudo random data, whose seed is part of your overall 'key'
Now length is not easily determined.
Compressed file indicators or file format not trivially detectable.
5. encrypt using one (or several in sequence) standard algorithm(s), whose key(s) are part of your overall 'key'
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:56AM
Bad guy: decrypt using $5 spanner.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)
This still leave the weakest link (key distribution) exposed. Now you have two keys that you need to distribute, and you COULD use different channels for each, but the likelyhood of that is low.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:59PM
What makes you think the key would need to be distributed? Not all encryption is for communication purposes.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.