Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages

Adam Shostack adam at homeport.org
Sat Dec 11 13:52:46 PST 2004


On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 10:24:09PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
| * R. A. Hettinga quotes a news article:
| 
| >  There have been numerous media reports in recent years that terrorist
| > groups, including al-Qaida, were using steganographic techniques.
| 
| As far as I know, these news stories can be tracked back to a
| particular USA Today story.  There's also been a bunch of stories how
| a covert channel in TCP could be used by terrorists to hide their
| communication.

There's very good evidence that Al Qaida does *not* use strong crypto.

I blogged on this at http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/000561.html

is was the first time I'd given such a talk since 9/11. It wasn't
useful after we'd made the decision to stop hemorrhaging money by
shutting down the Freedom Network. (That was May or June of 2001.) So
I did a fair bit of reading about Al Qaeda's use of crypto. One of the
more interesting techniques I found was the 'draft message' method.
(http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/002871.php)

It seems consistent that Al Qaeda prefers being 'fish in the sea' to
standing out by use of crypto. Also, given the depth and breadth of
conspiracies they believe in, it seems that they might see all us
cryptographers as a massive deception technique to get them to use bad
crypto. (And hey, they're almost right! We love that they use bad
crypto.)

There's other evidence for this. In particular, the laptops captured
have been exploited very quickly, in one case by a Wall St Journal
reporter. So rumors of steganography or advanced crypto techniques
have a burden of proof on them.

And see the link there to Ian Grigg's
http://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000246.html





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