Having lost that public battle, the NSA decided to get its backdoors through subterfuge: by asking nicely, pressuring, threatening, bribing, or mandating through secret order. The general name for this program is BULLRUN.
Defending against these attacks is difficult. We know from subliminal channel and kleptography research that it’s pretty much impossible to guarantee that a complex piece of software isn’t leaking secret information. We know from Ken Thompson’s famous talk on “trusting trust” (first delivered in the ACM Turing Award Lectures) that you can never be totally sure if there’s a security flaw in your software.
Since BULLRUN became public last month, the security community has been examining security flaws discovered over the past several years, looking for signs of deliberate tampering. The Debian random number flaw was probably not deliberate, but the 2003 Linux security vulnerability probably was. The DUAL_EC_DRBG random number generator may or may not have been a backdoor. The SSL 2.0 flaw was probably an honest mistake. The GSM A5/1 encryption algorithm was almost certainly deliberately weakened. All the common RSA moduli out there in the wild: We don’t know. Microsoft’s _NSAKEY looks like a smoking gun, but honestly, we don’t know.
Read more at Wired.
