[cryptography] Iranian Cryptography Vendor (backdoor reference)

[J. Oquendo]

Crypto AG has been accused of rigging its machines in collusion with intelligence agencies such as the German Bundesnachrichtendienst 
(BND) and the United States National Security Agency (NSA), enabling such organisations to read the encrypted traffic produced by the 
machines.[2] Suspicions of this collusion were aroused in 1986 following US president Ronald Reagan's announcement on national 
television that, through interception of diplomatic communications between Tripoli and the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, he had 
irrefutable evidence that Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya was behind the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing in which two US service 
personnel were killed and another fifty injured. President Reagan then ordered the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation. 
There is no conclusive evidence that there was an intercepted Libyan message.[citation needed]

Further evidence suggesting that the Crypto AG machines were compromised was revealed after the assassination of former Iranian Prime 
Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar in 1991. On August 7, 1991, one day before Bakhtiar's body was discovered, the Iranian Intelligence 
Service transmitted a coded message to Iranian embassies, inquiring "Is Bakhtiar dead?" Western governments were able to decipher 
this transmission, causing Iranian suspicion to fall upon their Crypto AG equipment.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/nsa_backdoors_i.html



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J. Oquendo
SGFA, SGFE, C|EH, CNDA, CHFI, OSCP, CPT, RWSP, GREM

"Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of
real peace" - Dalai Lama

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