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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:53PM   Printer-friendly

THE NATIONAL SECURITY Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn't know is just how much information the whistle-blower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access.

An Estonian company called Guardtime says it has a solution to that: using the same ideas that underpin the digital currency Bitcoin, the company says it can ensure no one can alter digital files, not even an organization's most senior executives or IT managers. The idea is to stop the next Snowden in his tracks by making it impossible to tamper with data, such as the NSA log files, in secret.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by trimtab on Friday June 05 2015, @04:35AM

    by trimtab (2194) on Friday June 05 2015, @04:35AM (#192371)

    Signing blocks of messages for validation as untampered is part of PGP from the early 90s.

    This is nothing, but PR for suckers.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 05 2015, @01:30PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 05 2015, @01:30PM (#192511) Journal

    The catch is how do you sign the signature of the previous log without that signature also being compromised.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by trimtab on Friday June 05 2015, @07:31PM

      by trimtab (2194) on Friday June 05 2015, @07:31PM (#192643)

      If you are using text like in PGP, you simply chain multiple new signatures as you add data to log and sign all the previous log data with later signatures that include the previous signatures. It could all be in text files with marks and signatures at whatever rate you are willing to use CPU to create the signatures.