[Cryptography] Updates on Durov charges in France

[efc at disroot.org]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2024, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

> 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?

True. Government getting involved has tendency to bury things or make them 
less good than originally intended. I think a prime example would be the 
EU cloud project which is just a disaster.

> 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.

I had no idea! If NSA can crack Tor at will, how come so few people using 
Tro get caught? Is it that they "save" this weapon for serious cases only? 
And when it comes to the people who do got caught, usually you read about 
them leaking their name or some kind of traceable information somewhere, 
or that their web site has a bug or something, but you never hear about 
NSA lending a helping hand.

> 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]
>