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In the field of cryptography, a secretly planted “backdoor” that allows eavesdropping on communications is usually a subject of paranoia and dread. But that doesn’t mean cryptographers don’t appreciate the art of skilled cyphersabotage. Now one group of crypto experts has published an appraisal of different methods of weakening crypto systems, and the lesson is that some backdoors are clearly better than others—in stealth, deniability, and even in protecting the victims’ privacy from spies other than the backdoor’s creator.
In a paper titled “Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems,” well-known cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier and researchers from the Universities of Wisconsin and Washington take the spy’s view to the problem of crypto design: What kind of built-in backdoor surveillance works best ?
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/sabotage-encryption-software-get-caught/
[Paper]: http://www.scribd.com/doc/257059894/Surreptitiously-Weakening-Cryptographic-Systems
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:10AM
Just make a preprocessor exception for your arch of choice and bury it there in assembly. Comment it as "/* 200msec worth of bit swapping magic*/" and no one will ever bother looking at it twice unless something fails to compile.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Non Sequor on Sunday March 01 2015, @02:14PM
Ken Thompson did something like that to create a backdoor in Unix. See http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html [bell-labs.com]
I think the backdoor was present in various lineages of Unix through the late 80s.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.