NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry

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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/tech-industry-tainted/



NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry
By DAVID KRAVETS AND ROBERT MCMILLAN
09.07.13 6:30 AM

Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.

The researchers, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, found that the number generator appeared to have been built with a backdoor — it came with a secret numeric key that could allow a third party to decrypt code that it helped generate.

According to Thursday’s reports by the ProPublica, the Guardian, and The New York Times, classified documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdon appear to confirm what everyone suspected: that the backdoor was engineered by the NSA. Worse still, a top-secret NSA document published with the reports says that the NSA has worked with industry partners to “covertly influence” technology products.

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The result is that the trustworthiness of the systems we used to communicate on the internet is in doubt. “I think all companies have a little bit of taint after this,” says Christopher Soghoian, a technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.