Earlier, Greg - Kucharo wrote:

We have talked plenty on the list about the NSA.What about the spy agencies of other nations?What do they have to offer in the way of crypto roadblocks.

In Australia, the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) is on par with the NSA in terms of responsibilities. The DSD is relatively unknown to most of the population, and indeed their charter was only made public in 1985 as a result of recommendations in the Hope Royal Commission on Australia's Security and Intelligence Agencies (the DSD report, along with another, was not published on "security grounds"). It's rather funny to read advertisements in the Cweath Gazette for DSD positions with duties involving ".. collection, analysis and reporting of foreign radar emissions and .." :-). Read Ball/Richardsons "The Ties that Bind" for a DSD history, but this 10-15 year old publication is out of date wrt. recent changes in DSD operation/etc. Anyway, cutting to the chase. I was having a chat with a local producer of crypto IDE/SCSI/IEEE802.3 cards just last week at our PC94 show. This place had tried to get these products approved for use by Government Departments (the Evaluated Products List) which means the DSD has to actually test and approve the product, but in his words "they wanted the product and a way to crack it in order to evaluate it, we said it couldn't be cracked, and they said 'well we can't evaluate it'". I was going to question him more on this, but I had no time to spare. I'd already waited 15 mins while he babbled with someone with an American accent and when this guy turned around, his nametag said "Department of State" (this was seriously amusing to my friends :-). Apart from that, they're going to Cebit'94 to market this stuff, so there seems to be no export problem. Digging a bit deeper, one finds that their product uses an "ENIGMA varient" for it's security, but DES (and soon IDEA) PLD tables are available. No prizes to those who want to guess which they are going to export :-) Matthew. -- Matthew Gream Consent Technologies M.Gream@uts.edu.au (02) 821 2043 PGPMail accepted

On Fri, 11 Mar 1994, Greg - Kucharo wrote:

"Im in for triple murder,how about you? I got 40 years for telling the Swedes about RSA so don't screw with me pal!Crypto huh,your one sick con."

There has still been zero in the Swedish public media about Clipper. I have introduced the subject in the national Fido echo about datacomm, including the unconfirmed information that .se (together with .uk) is one of the first external countries to apply for a KF. (Swedish Fidonet sysops seem to long for CALLER-ID, which has been postponed here for reasons of privacy, to keep track of their users. Wouldn't this also be beneficial for traffic analysis?) Cryptology in Sweden is probably centerer to the Forsvarets Radioanstalt ('Radio Agency of the Defense') which is as secretive about it's methods as any letter agency. Not until recently did it become known that they compromised the German G-printer during WWII. The teleprinter lines between occupied Norway and Denmark went through Sweden and the traffic was encrypted with this Enigma-like machine (I don't know exactly but it had about ten wheels that had to match in adjustment plus an extra level consisting of cables from the wheelhouse that could be set differently to twist the output). The crack was done all by himself by one legendary genius called Beurling using only pencil and paper. It took him two weeks from the day they picked him up at the university (mathematician of course). After the war he took the former seat of Einstein at the Princeton University but fell into obscurity (allegedly he had serious personal problems). Regardless of being neutral the Swedish Defence has cooperated with USA in covering the Russian's radio traffic from the 40's until now. I'm sure they got something back (more than RSA which is in the public domain). At the moment I have some probes out to laywers to establish the status of the Swedish cryptology laws (if any). A curiosity: The electromagnetic spectrum is considered free here, contrary to most European countries, meaning for example that pirate decoders for TV sattelite transmissions are legal. This will probably change when Sweden, unfortunately, soon enters the European Community. //mb