Thursday, 12. January 2012

Topic: SECURITY - on January 12, 2012 at 9:44:00 AM CET

FBI OpenBSD Backdoors and RSA Cipher Vulnerability

Here is a follow up to the FBI / OpenBSD / OCF encryption backdoors thread as promised. We had a three alarm fire at our house over the Christmas holidays and I am just now getting plugged back in.

  1. At ~1997 or thereabouts, the FBI approached a fellow by the name of Lew Jenkins, the Chairman and CEO of Premenos Technology Corp., about their development of an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) software suite used for corp-to-corp EDI transactions called "Templar".

  2. At that point in time encryption technology (especially public key encryption algorithms) were still considered munitions by the United States government, and presumably the FBI was interested in Premenos research related to key escrow and session recovery of RSA-encrypted communication sessions.

cryptome.org

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