[Cryptography] Ex-CIA Joshua Schulte Describes His Data/Crypto Hiding Prowess

[The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510]]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Wednesday, March 4, 2020 4:38 AM, John Young <jya at pipeline.com> wrote:

> Can't find it now but I recall NSA dissolving remains of
> disintegrated disks in an acid pool until only a soft pudding is
> left. This done to reduce chances of meticulous reassembly or
> recovering data from hard fragments.

That might be pre-drive shredder.  I don't know.

> Sounds comparable to incinerating into ashes, unless ashes (or
> smoke/vapor) can be mined for data.

That sounds pretty _Man From UNCLE_.

> Side question: are cloud server facilities designed as SCIFs?

Hard to say.

When last I knew, virtualization environments were a full-stop no-no because there was
no assurance of process isolation in particular and memory isolation in general.  Even
setting up an in-house cloud environment with bare-bones Xen or an OpenStack environment
was a non-starter, regardless of the circumstances (i.e., in a SCIF, on an isolated and
dedicated server with dedicated local storage).  That may have changed in ten years but
I don't know.

> Schulte trial testimony describes the CIA building where he worked to
> be constructed of several layers of SCIF vaults, deeper the layer
> stronger the protection, physical and electronic. That building has

So, pretty standard.

The Doctor [412/724/301/703/415/510]
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