[116944] in Cypherpunks
Re: Project: Hardening Crypto Against Big Brother's "Black
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vin McLellan)
Tue Aug 24 04:10:22 1999
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Message-Id: <E11J0xl-0004bz-00@polaris.shore.net>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 16:45:07 -0400
Reply-To: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
At 03:39 PM 8/20/99 -0400, John Young wrote:
>
>.... question is what
>is being planned that's not yet in the ga-ga newspapers. Anybody
>know who's leaking the government's goodies?
>
Not new technology, but worth a story a year from now....
Ex-government techie I know who spent many years working on various
active attacks on crypto end-point hosts recently told me, with a chuckle,
that the Cult of the Dead Cow mavens who authored Back Orifice 2K -- and
many of those who have so energetically defended the right of gray-hat
hackers to widely distribute such a stealthy and maluable remote-control
package -- may be taken aback when they realize how excited many LEAs and
intelligence agencies were to get hold of the BO2k source code.
I'm told there is already a vigorous back-channel discussion among
LEA techies on how to even further refine the stealth capabilities of BO and
trim back the size, the better to hide it when it is used for
court-authorized (or unauthorized) end-point digitial eavesdropping. They
are particularly impressed with the key-board logging feature, for some
reason. (A relatively straightforward way to obtain crypto keys?)
BO 2K is reportedly far more capable (and stealthy) than the remote
control ulilities that had been previously circulated (used?) among domestic
US LEAs, including the FBI. The NSA and the US AF are said to have leaner
stealthier tools in their own arsenals, but the BO2k is a big hit with major
metropolitian police forces, the FBI, and various federal agency Inspector
Generals.
Surete,
_Vin
