Personal (Use it if you'd like, but keep me out of it.)
Steve Bellovin wrote:
Slightly off-topic, but a reminder of the sort of thing that ordinary crypto doesn't hide.
http://www.silicon.com/news/500009-500001/1/5093.html?rolling=2
IT Myths: Colombian drugs gang's mainframe-assisted assassinations?
Reminds me of a Supercomputer system admin I ran across in California in the mid-1980s -- a part time Deputy Sheriff -- who (at the request of a California state LEA, and with the approval of his boss) was banging away at the DES-encrypted records of a guy, alleged to be a bookkeeper or financial analyst for a Columbia drug cartel, who had been arrested in California.
The story he told me was that the Deputy had been asked to try to brute-force the encryption on the file after the NSA and DEA had refused to attempt it.
Using free cycles on his corporate machine, he was into the project for a couple of months when a guy from the NSA showed up and convinced his boss that his effort was counterproductive to national security -- apparently because it threatened the reputation of DES.
At the time, I was more impressed that the Columbian was using a PC crypto package that apparently did not have an operational weaknesses that was then common in almost all commercial encryption packages for PCs.
Hope all is well for you and yours.
_Vin
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