Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • July 22, 2025 12:15 PM

@ Paul,

With regards,

“As an outsider looking in, it seems to me that the idea that the US constitution matters any more is sort of touching!”

Also as an outsider, I take a more extreme view of what is being done to the Constitution.

Put bluntly,

“There is no profit in the constitution.”

For those “self entitled” who view their views and incomes to be of the first importance.

About half of the US “economic activity” is based on the five or so Silicon Valley Mega Corps like Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and even Apple.

Thus what they say gets “legislator attention” in ways few of us can get our heads around.

If just one of those Corps was to fail then what happened with the Sub-Prime Mortgage will be considered just an economic side note. And as we know Sub-Prime led to a global recession we are still trying to climb out of and failing miserably to do so.

Most of those Mega Corps make their income from surveillance of their users, packaging their personal and private information up and pushing it out into what is laughingly called the “Advertising Market”.

Of course US legislation is going to ensure this continues as much as possible. But there is of course a cut out… To benefit from legislative protection the Mega Corps have to hand the “personal and private” user data across to the Government for no cost…

Bad for the 350million bodies in the US but consider the 8billion in the rest of the world who don’t even get the fig leaf of the shadow of the constitution.

My view point is in effect two fold,

1, Reliably encrypt everything you type that is even remotely personal and private.
2, Do not connect your computers you use for personal and private to any external communications.

Also be circumspect about what you do on line because it will be recorded and analysed.

Remember what was attributed to Cardinal Richelieu,

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

Well these days it’s rather more than that, in that it’s not what you write or say by which you will be hanged, it’s also where your eyes may wander.

All this “think of the children” nonsense with “age verification” has next to nothing to do with protecting anyone including children. In fact it is the very opposit, it’s being used to extract all sorts of personal and private data for profit.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/opinion_column_age_verification/

Clive Robinson • July 27, 2025 3:57 AM

@ Bloated Cow,

With regards,

“… host’s name is sprinkled throughout the footnotes of the referenced document.”

True, but most importantly you have not said why, or what you are hoping others will read into it?

So to correct that,

Bruce had a strong working relationship with Niels Ferguson “the man at Microsoft” who realised the mathematics of the backdoor and it’s properties.

As a result back in 2004 Bruce publicly gave voice to what had been upto that point more or less private suspicions by those close to or involved with the standards process. And continued to do so.

As a result Bruce became in many peoples eyes “the name” associated with it. As time moved forward almost a decade later the Ed Snowden revelations/trove in 2013 showed that the suspicions were more than justified.

Thus Bruce’s name had became synonymous with the not just the Public MSM side of it, but the academic papers side as his name got quoted over and over the “snow ball effect” happened.

Then the likes of the RSA got skewered for “taking a coercion from the NSA” and more and more evidence of the NSA badly “finessing” the Dual EC DRBG into NIST standards came out.

This in turn gave rise to others pointing out other crypto being pushed hard towards being put into NIST standards by the NSA was at best inadequate if not actually deficient.

Eventually NIST had no choice but to issue a revised standard without Dual EC, and stopped other standardisation processes where the NSA had been lets just say,

“Bullish with nonsense, rudeness, and arrogance”.

The thing is others who post to this blog had likewise been pointing out the historical progression of back doored crypto from even before the US NSA and UK GCHQ formerly existed. The man behind much of it in the US was William Friedman. And given time and FOI requests and similar his work on backdooring the worlds crypto became ever more clear[1].

If you look back in this blog you will find I detailed what was going on from the early days of mechanical field cipher machines with backdoored key-space strengths (C35/6)[1], through the NSA rigging the AES contest to make most implementations weak with side channels. How they encouraged Microsoft to make file formats predominately “known plaintext” at the begining such that attacking ciphertext was considerably easier and so on.

I also pointed out that if it was me doing the same thing, I’d go onto attacking “protocols” and “standards” both of which it later transpired the NSA and GCHQ did.

I even listed it as a hierarchy of attacks,

1, Standards
2, Protocols
3, Implementations
4, Plaintext
5, Key Space

And you can find it in various places on this blog and other documentation.

If you look, you will find much on this blog that was on average eight years ahead of the game. With some people getting upset about it and attacking posters on the blog, the blog it’s self, and the blogs host.

However Bruce has stuck with it, and if you look at Bruce’s work, you will see the roots of much of it in this blog and how it has influenced his thinking and in certain ways his direction in life.

As for Dual EC you will find he gives credit to the others involved where they are known to him and not scared of being named.

[1] Boris Hagelin in the 1930’s designed the method of what became the C-35 and C-36 US field cipher machines of WWII. It was based on a vending machine mechanical “coin counting” mechanism he had obtained the rights to. And from there he went on to set up Crypto AG in Zug Switzerland. That later became the subject of much intrigue possible assassination of his son and much controversy some of which involved the CIA and other SigInt and Intelligence agencies.

Less well known is the reason Boris got the break that nobody else did… It was William Friedman, who not just promoted the design but gave “suggestions” to Boris all through the history of Crypto AG’s mechanical cipher machines. In fact there is evidence that “other agencies” ensured that only Crypto AG “prospered” and made cipher machines for the second and third world countries to use. Hence the US through the US and UK SigInt agencies “back doored the world”.