[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Henry Baker]

At 05:54 PM 2/13/2020, DV Henkel-Wallace wrote:
>> From: Christian Huitema <huitema at huitema.net>
>> Date: February 14, 2020 at 8:32:05 AM GMT+9
>> 
>> If anything, the article shows that buying devices from a neutral
>> country is not a guarantee against interference by the CIA.
>
>On point that stuck in my mind from my visit to the old Stasi HQ was their belief that it was safe to source gear from neutral countries in general and Switzerland in particular.  Swiss miniature cameras, wire recorders, radios and other electronics were in widespread use and were considered the state of the art.  I was surprised that so little was sourced from the USSR and that the USSR didn't have more control over the security practices of their client states.

I seem to recall that the Easties were fond of copying DEC equipment,
while the Russkies were fond of copying IBM equipment.

Just before 2000, there were a lot of 70year-old IBM programmers fixing
really old 1960's/70's Cobol programs in the U.S.; many of them were
*ex-Soviets* who learned on 1960-era IBM 360 'mainframe' copies.  For
some reason, the Soviets stuck with the 1960's IBM DOS/TOS SW, even
after 370-era software became available.

Some of this Cobol SW is undoubtedly still running in emulation in
DMV's and also handling vote tabulation all across the U.S. :-)

Perhaps DEC never had a Y2K problem, so I don't recall Eastie programmers
working on Y2K issues.

BTW, IBM mainframes had powerful radio side-channels: in the early
1960's, one of the programmers that worked with me used to put an
ordinary portable radio on top of the IBM CPU so that he could
"listen" to his program go through its paces.  Any change in the
audio would indicate a problem with the software.

I would guess that this radio technique would have been sufficient
to enable a person listening to pick out the individual bits in a
modular exponentiation, as those computers weren't all that fast.

We didn't have a name for it, but in retrospect we should have
called it 'ADB' -- 'Audio Debugging Bridge'.

I never tested the *range* of these radio signals, but I suspect
that they could easily have been heard outside the building
where the computer was located.