Re:The NSA called me after midnight and requested my source ...
by meowface on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @04:53PM
(#22939195)
Right. They could possibly do this and have done it before. But they wouldn't need to request the source code from the author in order to do it - they could patch the binary. Also, it's a pretty involved thing to do and not that easy to pull off in a situation like this. For example, presumably all of the targets already have the software installed, and they may have no reason to visit the official site again; especially if updates are very infrequent.
Finally, it wouldn't do them any good for trying to crack things that are already encrypted with it, which from the conversation does seem like was at least one of their goals. (Could be deception, but that's the most likely reading, to me.)
I'm just saying that that doesn't seem to be a likely reason for requesting the source code.
The reason is likely what they said it was: they want to look at the source code to see if there's some way to crack the encryption faster than they otherwise could - for example, some bug causing key generation to be somewhat predictable.
Re:The NSA called me after midnight and requested my source ...
by iancarroll on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @07:27PM
(#22940397)
Man in the Middle attacks work even if one goes to the official site. It could have looked something like this.
1) User attempts to go to the official site https://...
2) NSA intercepts the message, downgrades to http and sends back a dummy site with the malicious binary [1].
3) The user doesn't notice the change and uses the malicious binary.
Today, a series of steps have been taken to make such an attack more difficult. Now browsers tend to try to warn the user and sites can take advantage of HSTS preload lists[2]. However, this article was written about an event in early 2000 when many of these safeguards didn't exist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downgrade_attack
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts...