Post a Comment On: China Matters

With RSA, a big and respected name (actually initials) in cryptography, currently getting flayed in the public press for taking $10 million from the NSA and, in return, embedding a dodgy, NSA-compromised random number generator a.k.a. DUAL EC EBRG in its products (RNGs help generate encryption keys; a compromised RNG yields a limited, more crackable set of keys), a few observations:

First, as is probably recalled, the compromised character of the NSA RNG was revealed in a previous tranche of the Snowden documents in September, and an embarrassed RSA quickly issued a recommendation that users cease using that particular RNG.

Second, even back in October, there were rumblings about possible financial considerations playing a part in RSA's willingness to include the RNG in its products.  Here's a snip from a piece I wrote at the time:

[On a recent episode of Science Friday] Ira Flatow asked Philip Zimmerman [creator of the PGP open-key e-mail encryption system] why RSA would have done such a thing. There was a long, awkward silence and some awkward laughter before Zimmerman slid into the passive voice/third person zone:
ZIMMERMAN: And yet RSA did a security - did use it as their default random number generator. And they do have competent cryptographers working there. So.

FLATOW: How do you explain that?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, I'm not going to - I think I'd rather not be the one to say.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: But if someone else were to say it, what would they say?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, someone else might say that maybe they were incentivized.  Maybe Mr. Zimmerman had an advance peek at the relevant Snowden documents.  I think it more likely that he had already heard some tittle-tattle in his high tech circles but was not interested in calling down a corporate and legal sh*train upon himself by openly accusing the RSA of taking government money (interesting legal question: is it slanderous to allege that a US corporation engaged in a legal transaction with the US government?).

Third, Blame the Suits!  Per the Reuters expose:

No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.

"The labs group had played a very intricate role at BSafe [the product line that was compromised by the RNG], and they were basically gone," said labs veteran Michael Wenocur, who left in 1999.
Actually, outside security analyst Bruce Schneier and others had raised serious concerns about DUAL EC EBRG in 2007 in a public forum and, as Zimmerman pointed out, RSA had competent cryptographers in the building.  DUAL EC EBRG was provided as only one option, albeit the default, and security-savvy users would be able to select another, better RNG.  And RSA cryptographers could further console themselves with the awareness that, even if Clueless Enduser kept DUAL EC EBRG as a default, probably the only entity with the message collection and analysis capability to exploit it effectively was America's own NSA.

In other words, it wasn't just RSA Chief Executive and Designated Villain Art Coviello sneaking down into the lab and inserting the lethal code while the techies obliviously shipped the compromised product.

Fourth, I think there is a growing awareness that a significant element of the Snowden story is the collusion between Big Tech and the NSA, fueled by the awareness that both sides want the same thing: a thoroughly backdoored Internet open to individual data profiling and surveillance penetration (and tolerate the resultant security breaches as cost of doing business/collateral damage).

I wonder if the story will get any more traction, since there are sizable vested economic, political, and ideological interests extending all the way to the Oval Office that are engaged in perpetuating the image of a benign, democratic/populist information order dedicated to information security.  The constituency interested in seeing Google and the other tech giants share the blame for ruining the Internet--and in the process evaporating a few hundred billion dollars of personal wealth, market cap, and stock options--is, on the other hand, powerless and vanishingly small.

Inside the tech industry, the attitude seems to be one of damage control i.e. media initiatives to convince the public that the Internet companies care about YOU and hate helping out that nasty old government.   As to the question of whether a corporate Snowden will emerge, the attitude seems to be, as Phil Zimmerman--a genuine and battered hero of the encryption wars in the 1990s--put it: "I think I'd rather not be the one to say."  Maybe the code of omerta lives on in the tech industry.

Fifth, I find it amusing and somewhat irritating that, ever since I wrote about RSA in October, I am bombarded with RSA pop-up ads on my own blog and across the web.  It's the Internet equivalent of a golden retriever that pursues me down the street driven by the irresistible urge to sniff the seat of my trousers.  Make it stop!