Electrospaces net: The report of a Swiss investigation into the case of Crypto AG

Ephemeral keys are used by the Threema clients and server to create fresh keys for usage in Threema’s bespoke client-to-server protocol. In theory, this should make different sessions independent from each other (i.e. compromising one session should not influence the security of past or future sessions). It has more than 10 million users and more than 7000 on-premise customers. Prominent users of Threema include the Swiss Government and the Swiss Army, as well as the current Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz. Threema has been widely advertised as a secure alternative to other messengers. SonntagsZeitung said SECO, which is in charge of authorizing exports of sensitive equipment, believes it was deceived into clearing the sale of Crypto’s machines and software, and argues it would never have done so had it known of the scheme.

outrage in switzerland

On the other hand, some of the vulnerabilities we discovered may have been present in https://currency-trading.org/ for a long time. As showcased in the CRIME attack on TLS, this compress-then-encrypt paradigm is vulnerable to attack if the attacker has partial control of the data being protected. In the context of Threema, an attacker can control their own username, and we show that this is sufficient to make it possible to extract the victim user’s long-term key. On Android, a new backup attempt is made whenever the application is restarted and the last backup failed; this means that it suffices for an attacker to use the debugging tools to restart the application repeatedly.

Hopefully someone has also come up with some other secure terrestrial way of distribution, like a quantum version of a diffie hellman exchange, so this could be truly useful. As you’ve already pointed out indirectly, coming up with quantum keys is not a real breakthrough, others are already doing it who have the means. While there are many routes to application security, bundles that allow security teams to quickly and easily secure applications and affect security posture in a self-service manner are becoming increasingly popular.

Switzerland closes investigation into CIA-linked encryption firm

Further investigation by the Swiss parliament’s Control Delegation into the espionage concluded earlier this month that the country’s own intelligence service had benefitted from the information gathered through the encryption firms. The company, which had been split off from cryptographic equipment maker Gretag in 1987, sold voice, data and fax encryption equipment to governments around the world until it stopped operations two years ago. Swiss intelligence benefited from CIA-Crypto spying affair This content was published on Nov 10, 2020 Nov 10, 2020 Parliamentary investigation has revealed that Swiss intelligence service were aware of the Zug-based firm Crypto AG’s involvement in US-led spying. When encryption technology evolved from mechanical to electronic in the 1960s, the NSA manipulated the algorithms used by Crypto devices, so they could be quickly decoded.

Asked why he had not asked more questions about the company he was buying, Linde, the new owner of Crypto International, said he viewed the allegations as “just rumours”. Most of Crypto’s workforce was unaware of the company’s secret, but in 1977, an engineer who had grown suspicious of its algorithms was fired after he traveled to Damascus and fixed the vulnerabilities in the firm’s products operated by the Syrian government. The CIA and BND agreed the purchase of Crypto in 1970 but, fearing exposure, the BND sold its share of the company to the US in the early 1990s.

The alternative with closed source is worse, you know that no independent security researchers have looked at it. Any researchers who have looked at it are likely under NDA, and the source could have been acquired via nefarious means and distributed to blackhat groups. The only alternative to auditing existing code yourself, is writing new code from scratch which is likely to be even more time consuming. Likewise there is a very big difference between the internal objectives of the Chinese states and the outward objectives. The nature of these objectives seems to at least go back to Mao’s awareness that true communism cannot exist instantaneously within global capitalism. China thus uses this rather sound strategy to build it’s economic dominance while raising the quality of life for the Chinese people.

intelligence agencies

There had also been rumors for years about Omnisec AG and the presumed influence of foreign secret services. Now several sources confirm … Omnisec AG was also under the influence of foreign secret services. However, Swiss authorities only noticed the devices weren’t secure in the mid-2000s.

Likewise the degree China would uses it’s “soft power” to for “nation building” outside China is an open question. It’s clear this can be used to pressure against support for certain things (e.g. three Ts) and that it considers all Chinese dissidents effectively still Chinese citizens but it still seems unclear how much it would affect the average American’s lifestyle. The assumption here is the power that Chinese gaining will corrupt, as the idiom goes. But still, every few years it seems the Swiss get a wake-up call about their neutrality. The history books were rewritten to include the shameful policy of turning Jewish refugees back at the borders.

Why Swiss neutrality matters

There are four main approaches to encryption key management in the cloud. Fundamentally, there is a trade-off to be made between keeping control over your keys and benefitting from a fully managed cloud service. Cloud customers wishing to retain more control will need to invest more effort to manage the additional complexity. Swiss authorities said later on Tuesday that they had opened an investigation into the allegations that the encryption devices organization was a front operated by the the CIA and West German intelligence that enabled them to break the codes of the countries using their products. The reports said that at least four countries – Israel, Britain, Sweden and officially neutral Switzerland – knew of the operation, called “Operation Rubicon”, or were allowed access to some of the secrets it unearthed. But some other security experts said they aren’t nearly ready to declare a major breakthrough, at least not until the company publishes the full details of its research.

  • Clients can withdraw the key at any time; from that point of time, the CSP has no access to the data.
  • When confronted with this a few years later, he refused to take his responsibility.
  • While there are many routes to application security, bundles that allow security teams to quickly and easily secure applications and affect security posture in a self-service manner are becoming increasingly popular.
  • Want to sell encryption don’t fucking do it out of Switzerland, encryption is dead in Switzerland and the Swiss murdered it to, FEED THEIR GREED.
  • Vinokur said the new protocol utilizes a method known as quantum key distribution.

If you don’t have the source for your crypto you WILL get screwed at some point. All these “discoveries” simple mean that the UK/USA couldn’t find any real malicious conducts like those implicating Crypto AG, and they had to resort to doing code reviews and churn out theoretical threats. Calling “unsafe memcpy” means nothing other than heavy optimization if the callers are already protected from malicious inputs. Have these western puppets found any actual threat vector path and went unanswered?

We may not like the fact that they are doing it, but it really is a necessary evil of the world. And then over time it would have been bad for everyone who wasn’t white, and then anyone who wasn’t German, and then eventually anyone who wasn’t a blond German with blue eyes who could prove their descendance from someone with two umlauts in their name. Why can conservatives not understand the difference between the government and a private company? They claim to be all about the free market and little government, but when it actually happens they get upset and confused. It’s why through a series of events, I went from being a tech worker whom originally supported sciences, to living in China doing simple English education. The ultimate goal to explore better lesser known aspects of Chinese culture and to see how they approach this concept of a “one planet”, especially as global concerns for climate increase.

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So could the https://cryptonews.wiki/ experience help iron out problems brought to light during the 2000 U.S. presidential election fiasco, which ended in a Supreme Court decision that ushered George W. Bush into the White House? Extremely unlikely, Dill says, noting that the U.S. still has no minimum standards for conducting federal elections that would create consistency across the country. It may have been a different Swiss security corporation that incorporated a back door by request of the U.S., but I read it here. Switzerland has not participated in a war since then, even though remaining completely impartial turned out to be difficult during times. During World War II, when completely surrounded by Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in the south, the Swiss allowed cargo trains through the Alps despite there were rumors that these trains actually transported Jewish people from Italy to Germany. The United States is the beacon of true democracy…A country with institutions that actually work for the benefit of humanity, unlike the Chinese Communist Party that uses companies like Huawei to spy around the world.

demanded an investigation

Of course, the downside of a OTP is that the key material is pretty large, so you have to find a way to get it to both sides in a secure manner. One time pads don’t have keys, they are a stream of random data as long as the message that are XOR’d with the message. That means that the same ciphertext could be absolutely anything, there is no way to ‘decrypt’ it unless you know the exact plaintext you are trying to recover. Entangled quantum communication to detect eavesdropping is another matter, that doesn’t have anything to do with use or nonuse of encryption. Seeing the state of an entangled photon for example lets one know the state of its pair. The goal would be to prevent interception and also storage for later time.

At their height, Operations Thesaurus and Rubicon provided the US with a powerful intelligence edge. When Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were hosted by the former president Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978 to negotiate an Egyptian-Israeli peace accord, the US was able to monitor all Sadat’s communications with Cairo. I wrote this simple data encryption / decryption algorition and am curious what anyone thinks of whether or not it is easy to crack, as my intent was to do the quickest, shortest thing that’s good enough for now. In general, If the key is as large or larger than the data, no algorithm out there is going to be able to decrypt it.

Britain aims to get quantum computing ‘by 2030’ with record investment

The mention of “five of six” https://cryptominer.services/ is likely a reference to the Five Eyes electronic intelligence-sharing agreement between the U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “This raises the question of espionage even within the country,” he told SRF. The purpose of the investigation was to find out whether Crypto AG had concealed facts in the export licence applications and/or falsely declared important information. The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland has dropped criminal proceedings in connection with the Crypto affair, it announced on Monday in response to a request from the Keystone-SDA news agency.

In December 2022, we agreed on the 9th of January 2023 as the date of public disclosure. This is a second instance of a cross-protocol attack, this time between the registration protocol and the E2E protocol. A malicious server can trick the client into using the same key while talking to the server during the initial registration protocol and while talking to other users in the E2E protocol.

Swiss company sells encryption and everyone goes yeah nahhh, you have got to be fucking kidding. Want to sell encryption don’t fucking do it out of Switzerland, encryption is dead in Switzerland and the Swiss murdered it to, FEED THEIR GREED. Artificial intelligence is competing in another endeavor once limited to humans — creating propaganda and disinformation.

The value proposition of FOSS has never been “that every bit of code in the ecosystem you are looking at has been properly vetted” and by moving the goalposts there you are being a disingenuous douchebag. Avoiding becoming dependent on foreign goods is a perfectly sensible strategy precisely because of the reasons you’ve highlighted. Even in the absence of backdoors , you don’t want to become dependent on a single supplier as that might allow that supplier and/or the country they are based in to have unwanted leverage over you. They actually use reproducible builds so that they can certify correspondence between source and binary.

Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology , the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and Albion College in Michigan generated and transmitted secret quantum keys over 185 kilometers of fiber-optic cable during an experiment last year—the farthest such information has traveled. The first experimental quantum encryption prototype, created in 1991, was able to send information a mere 32 centimeters (12.6 inches). Still, the neutrality was largely respected, and having a neutral party allowed the two warring sides to talk to each other.

China’s position on this matter will be key and it will be interesting to see how they grow their economy while being a more green economy. In short, we know that the FOSS model pays dividends specifically because we see its failures, and see them corrected. And we have reason to believe that it produces better results because of what we know of the closed source development process, which is not fundamentally different except that less people have eyes on the code. And also in short, you are grossly mischaracterizing the argument to make yourself sound more intelligent than you really are.

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