Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
December 23, 2013
NSA Spying: Whom Do You Believe?
On Friday, Reuters reported that RSA entered into a secret contract to make DUAL_EC_PRNG the default random number generator in the BSAFE toolkit. DUA_EC_PRNG is now known to have been backdoored by the NSA.
Yesterday, RSA denied it:
Recent press coverage has asserted that RSA entered into a “secret contract” with the NSA to incorporate a known flawed random number generator into its BSAFE encryption libraries. We categorically deny this allegation.
We know from both Mark Klein and Edward Snowden -- and pretty much everything else about the NSA -- that the NSA directly taps the trunk lines of AT&T (and pretty much every other telcom carrier). On Friday, AT&T denied that:
In its statement, AT&T sought to push back against the notion that it provides the government with such access. "We do not allow any government agency to connect directly to our network to gather, review or retrieve our customers’ information," said Watts.
I've written before about how the NSA has corroded our trust in the Internet and communications technologies. The debates over these companies' statements, and about exactly how they are using and abusing individual words to lie while claiming they are not lying, is a manifestation of that.
Me again:
This sort of thing can destroy our country. Trust is essential in our society. And if we can't trust either our government or the corporations that have intimate access into so much of our lives, society suffers. Study after study demonstrates the value of living in a high-trust society and the costs of living in a low-trust one.
We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.
EDITED TO ADD (12/23): The requested removal of an NSA employee from an IETF group co-chairmanship is another manifestation of this mistrust.
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Thursday, December 26, 2013
NSA HAS CORRODED TRUST ESSENTIAL TO SOCIETY
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