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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Paging-Dan-Brown dept.

In an update to the speculation that TrueCrypt development was officially discontinued as a response to efforts by US intelligence agencies to compromise the project, the TrueCrypt web site seems to contain a secret message warning potential users of NSA interference in the integrity of the software. The apparent message, "Don't use TrueCrypt because it is under the control of the NSA" is read as an acrostic in Latin, contained in the message announcing developer cessation of the project on SouceForge. Two independent analytical exercises, conducted independently, arrive at the same conclusion. User "Badon" at the Live Business Chat message board has a detailed exegesis including screenshots and footnotes.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: I have cross checked this on some Latin specific sites, and the consensus seems to be that it is nonsensical from a perspective of proper Latin grammar and syntax. However, Google Translation does reproduce these results. I can certainly believe that a warning might have been composed using G.T. rather than by consulting a classicist. --ED]

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2014, @02:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18 2014, @02:34AM (#56733)

    An interesting thing to test with TrueCrypt is to see how they maintained backward compatibility with LRW. There certainly are ways to do backward compatibility right. TrueCrypt backward compatibility may have done the right way.

    If an attacker could force TrueCrypt code into using only backward compatibility mode, then under certain circumstnces key material encrypted in its own volume could be leaked due to one flaw in LRW. And certainly TrueCrypt disks operating in backward compatibility mode ARE today subject to the problems with LRW:

    http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1619/email/msg00962.html [ieee.org]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_P1619#LRW_issue [wikipedia.org]