[Wolves] PGP

Peter Evans zen8486 at zen.co.uk
Thu Aug 12 14:24:12 BST 2004


On Thursday 12 August 2004 14:09, fizzy wrote:
> Or just makes the NSA write harder to spot back doors
> :) That is if they aren't cracking pgp already, truth
> is, no-one really knows...

You'd hope that at least one person, the programmer within the NSA, knows 
whether he's cracking PGP :P

But then having been a programmer myself you never really know until it's 
compiled and running quite what it will do.

There's some interesting anecdotes about this very subject in Bruce Schnieders 
'Secrets & Lies...' book.  Can't remember the exact words but I seem to 
remember reading that when one of the NSA cryptographers was asked about open 
source and indeed the commercial products that implement encryption he smiled 
rather like a fox in a chicken house and muttered something about it making 
his life easier.
-- 
Regards,

Pete Evans.



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