Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure about the claim here but the FBI has always been all over cryptography companies and products and this was well before Snowden, Phil Zimmermann (PGP) knows about this.

In 2003-2006, we built a service that was a financial system to exchange financial data through various means including AS/2 EDI over HTTP with big companies and the government suppliers such as AAFES (Army and Air Force Exchange). Initially we had RSA, PGP and a custom encryption in there, the latter two for other features besides EDI. We got a letter from the FBI asking us to switch only to RSA, they wanted to know about our use of PGP and wanted to see our custom encryption if we continued to use it. Being a small/medium company we switched to just RSA to avoid any issues. It was an odd day, when I came into the office they told me I had an FBI letter on my desk and you can imagine what happens around an office when something like that happens. Very strange day indeed.

Moral of the story, if you create your own crypto or aren't using the ones you are supposed to use, in any capacity, expect some knocking.

Did the FBI give any reason/leverage as to why you should comply with their ask?

If you are writing about it here, I'm assuming it wasn't an NSL (national security letter) and so would you be open to publishing a copy of it publicly? Would be great to get sunlight on that.

Probably in an old desk somewhere, it wasn't an NSL but I wish I would have held onto it, I would have captured it on my phone if smart phones were around then. It basically said if you are going to keep using PGP or custom encryption for the app that they would like to meet with us to discuss since we were connecting to government financial endpoints. Then it said if we use RSA that this would not be a needed discussion. It was very strange and eerie all in all and we did not want to rock the boat.

Since we were small/medium agency/company we just complied as we were just helping smaller/medium companies sell stuff like Ukuleles and hats to AAFES so it was not a big issue. The key of the app was the EDI/AS2 integration that didn't use the PGP or custom crypto as it had to use certain algos RSA/DSA/TripleDES/FIPS/strong hashing for Drummond Group interoperability certification. The certification of interoperability and crypto communication was required to trade with Wal-mart, govt/AAFES etc.

To be fair, naively and given the use case you described, that sounds to me like in this particular instance they are trying to ensure that the encryption being used is "secure enough" for the govt. rather than "not too secure". It just so happens that the bureaucracy's definition of "secure enough" is a keyword whitelist that happens to have 'RSA' there and not 'PGP'.

Wickr CEO claims they were also approached to backdoor their product:

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/319544-what-it-s-lik...

Interesting. That strongly implies that RSA has a flaw, which is news to me.

We used Bouncy Castle and Microsoft CryptoAPI for our RSA usage, who knows if RSA, CryptoAPI or others had trapdoors but they can neither confirm nor deny.

Or that the FBI was confident enough in their ability to steal private keys, or that they believed the keys were low-enough strength that they could crack the keys and decrypt the intercepted data at some point in the future.

If the USG was aware of a secret flaw in RSA, they wouldn't be tipping their hands about it to random small companies. Come on.

But: avoid RSA anyways. It's inferior to modern curve crypto.

I think the only reason they contacted us was because we were one of 25ish companies certified to communicate with government endpoints early on in HTTP based EDI. It was right at the moment that EDI went from faxing to FTP to HTTP/email in AS2/3/4. Others were Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, EDS, Axway, /n software etc.

It wasn't until we had to connect to AAFES that it was a problem. We were small but we were sending a good amount of orders and financial data from Wal-mart, AAFES, and other gov't sources that had early EDI over HTTP/S going. They were also recommending us to vendors on their approved EDI software list and probably wanted to recommend ones that played nicely.

This is entirely plausible. If you're doing crypto on behalf of USG data, they have all sorts of dumb CYA rules.

It doesn't. Maybe they were looking out for customers? Custom encryption is usually frowned upon because it's not tested.

It could be the opposite. Perhaps the FBI wanted to ensure this firm, which was moving government data, had a properly implemented security system.

I'd hazard a guess that 'custom encryption' would be a big red flag if the FBI was doing a security audit of who has access to government data.

PGP uses RSA, so anyone in possession of an RSA exploit could exploit it just the same, which would make this a doubly-ridiculous way for them to show their hand. I think it's more likely that the issue was the opposite: the FBI didn't think PGP was secure enough, certified correctly for this work, or that they believed there might be legal issues around PGP.

Weren't there reports that the NSA paid RSA to make flawed crypto the default?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/report-nsa-paid-rsa...

What encryption scheme were you using in PGP?

We just used it for a trusted/whitelist of users to send encrypted emails to one another, usually in the same company, and to forward on invoices/purchase orders to be sent. We just used default PGP setup with symmetric keys (which used PGP/IDEA internally I think). We switched this portion to Bouncy Castle with RSA.

We were just using it for additional ways to send financial docs usually invoices/purchase orders and acks/receipts using PGP where users traded keys, in places where the company was too small to warrant EDI needs and to send invoices to/from the system. PGP was being productized at the time and people were about encrypted email for a while so we added that feature in.

But you weren't using RSA for the asymmetric PGP keys?

Probably, PGP used RSA for asymmetric keys and session keys before IDEA, can't recall exactly but it was a short lived part of the app and PGP was changing during that time and now has changed supporting most algos with OpenPGP. I think we only added PGP at the time because it was a hot item/had some buzz about it during the time.

In our app, we switched it to Bouncy Castle for digital signatures after removing it for the other features.

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