NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)

Re:NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) by j45 on Sunday December 22, 2019 @08:32PM (#21860873)

This backdoor would be the equivalent of a combined outlook and a .net app being compromised.

It might be hard to imagine the scope that notes encompassed in its day... it simultaneously provide mobile, offline first apps with usable data replication.. among a few features that might be surprising:

Notes had a few more unique features that modern devs might cringe to hear isn’t all that new:

- Notes provided early Nosql/relational data. Everything was a document and have fun stitching it all together in views. The NotesSQL layer would add an ODBC based layer to simulate relational dbs.

- When Lotus added Domino to Notes, it was among the first that could deliver the same Lotus Notes code to a web application. Early write once, deploy anywhere (woda). Existing apps that only ran inside Notes now worked in a web browser.

All this.. for a piece of software that was originally an email server and built workflow around it. all compromised.

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Re:NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) by stan_rogers on Sunday December 22, 2019 @09:52PM (#21861173)

"[O]riginally an email server" gets it rather backwards. It was more like a BBS/forum hosting platform that had messaging between boards (databases), with user email as a special case.

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Re:NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) by j45 on Sunday December 22, 2019 @11:56PM (#21861563)

Fair..

Notes for email / groupware was a common implementation, and it was more capable than alternatives like Exchange, Novell Groupware, because of the application building abilities of Notes.

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