[Cryptography] Updates on Durov charges in France

[Peter Fairbrother]

On 02/09/2024 23:53, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
[...]
>     When the return on investment is high, high-profile attacks are not
>     unheard of.
>
>     Also, infiltrating open source projects for years, is not high-profile.
>
> The tell that an attack has a nation state behind it is often a
> comically long kill chain.
>
> OK to get our backdoor into SSH we are going to compromise this
> compression algorithm project and futz with the test libraries...
>
> OK, we will buy this Swiss cryptographic equipment maker and ship
> product for decades...
>
>
> Cases of death caused by autoerotic asphyxiation are vanishingly rare
> except amongst the enemies of Vladimir Putin which accounted for 75% of
> the known cases until the coincidence was pointed out.

On a less dramatic note, how about simple distraction?

Around 2004 the Mixmaster/Mixminion onion routing people were thinking
about anonymous browsers, mostly led by David Dingledene and Paul Syverson.

Paul was a US Navy officer, and arranged the money for Roger to make
TOR, taking many of the people with him. Several of us - Lucky Green,
Len Sassaman, myself, some others - thought this was very much the wrong
way to go, but Roger went this own way, taking Nick Mathewson with him.

[Nick was the main coder for Mixminion, and his absence was a major
cause of the demise of Mixmimion/Mixmaster]

We might instead have written a browser which was actually a bit
anonymous, rather than something which is almost transparent to the NSA
- but a bit of misdirection and .. the NSA wind up with the perfect
situation, Mixmaster dies, and people use TOR which the NSA can crack
almost at will.

As for Paul's .onions - well it helps to have some way of identifying
potential bad guys.

[Paul was an OK guy and a sort-of friend, but first and foremost he was
a Naval Officer. Roger just wanted fame too badly. My 2c]

Peter Fairbrother