Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
a government to recover any keys exported out of the United States In 1998,
Skipjack was declassified along with KEA (see page 223). They had to settle
for a small slice of the cake after all.
Other Secret Doors
: The idea behind any of the U.S. government key
escrow plans, such as the above, was to give law enforcement timely access to
plaintext (without the consent or knowledge of the user), in order to solve the
problem of criminals enciphering evidence of their nefarious deeds. The public,
however, saw the solution as far worse than the perceived problem.
Essentially the security devices, such as those described above for the Clip-
per Chip, add a subliminal channel (the secret door we talked about earlier), to
the users' communications lines (see pages 184, 192, and 374). This notion of
building such a channel (or secret door), into hardware at the time of manufac-
ture was being employed elsewhere. On March 18, 1992, the Iranian military
counterintelligence service arrested Hans Bueller, who was Crypto AG's
10.40
marketing representative in Tehran. The charges were that he was a spy for
Germany and the United States. During his nine-month imprisonment, he was
questioned five hours every day. Although Buehler said he was not beaten, he
was
told
he would be beaten and, during these interrogations, he was tied to a
wooden bench. It turns out that, despite his thirteen years of employment at
Crypto AG, Buehler was ignorant of the allegation that the firm was incorpo-
rating a secret door in their cryptographic devices (ostensibly, at the behest of
the NSA and the BND,
Bundesnacrichtendtendienst
, the German intelligence
service). Buehler stated that if he knew anything, they would have gotten it
out of him.
In order to sweep the issue under the carpet as quickly as possible, Crypto
AG paid a million dollar ransom to Iran to secure Buehler's release in January
of 1993. After his return to Switzerland, the firm fired him and demanded that
he pay the money back to them. However, not everything went under the carpet
since some of the Crypto AG engineers came to Buehler's defence and allegedly,
threatened to disclose that the crypto devices had been altered by American
and German engineers, who inserted their own cryptosystems.
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The Swiss
media was inspired by the Buehler affair, and began to dig into Crypto AG's
background. The firm launched a lawsuit in response, but there was an out-
of-court settlement days before the trial was to begin. Crypto AG denies all
allegations.
10.40
Crypto AG is a company begun by Boris Hagelin who moved his company to Zug, Switzer-
land, in 1948, and changed its name as the current incorporated entity in 1959. Previously,
it was a company called Aktieboget Cryptograph, based in Sweden, owned by Avrid Damn.
After Damn's death in 1927, Hagelin took it over. He became the first millionaire from cryp-
tography due to the royalties earned from the products sold by the firm, such as the M-209
(see page 90).
10.41
On December 4, 1995,
The Baltimore Sun
reported that the NSA has secretly rigged
Crypto AG devices so American intelligence could easily decipher the traQc generated by
these machines. The newspaper claimed this information was obtained from former Crypto
AG employees whose story was supported by company documents.
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