Breaking Iranian Codes (Re: CRYPTO-GRAM, June 15, 2003)

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Tue Jun 15 11:37:54 EDT 2004


"R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com> forwarded:

>So now the NSA's secret is out.  The Iranians have undoubtedly changed
>their encryption machines, and the NSA has lost its source of Iranian
>secrets.  But little else is known.  Who told Chalabi?  Only a few
>people would know this important U.S. secret, and the snitch is
>certainly guilty of treason.

Someone (half-)remembered reading the Crypto AG story in the Baltimore Sun
several years ago, bragged to Chalabi that the US had compromised Iranian
crypto, and the story snowballed from there.  The story could have started out
with a loquacious (Sun-reading) cab driver for all we know.  Some reports have
suggested the source was drunk, so maybe it was a drunk in a bar.  Maybe
Chalabi read the story himself and invented the snitch to make it seem more
important than it was, or to drive the US security community nuts with an orgy
of internal witch-hunting.  Given the lack of further information, it could
have been just about anything.

Peter.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list