I wonder if this trap street message, which was inserted in some code initializing a DES chip, was chosen because it was rumored that NSA had backdoored DES. The article doesn't mention it, but it would be quite a coincidental choice!
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http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
In the Macintosh Classic's ROM, there were debug sequences that not only would display pictures of the development team, but write the text "STOLEN FROM APPLE COMPUTER" to the screen. http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_se_easter_egg.php
I can't seem to find in the article the reason he plucked just that message, and why he stuffed it in the DEC routine.
Am I missing something?
Things I've Put A Lot of Energy Into
Sun Microsystems
Sun is a computer manufacturer, long a leader in the technical workstation and database markets. Many Web pages are served from a Sun server. Sun is now a multi-billion-dollar company; working there made me financially independent. It was acquired by Oracle in 2010. I was its fifth employee, and later a consultant. I handled architecture, design, implementation, and debugging of Sun Workstations. Wrote and maintained bootstrap and diagnostic ROMs for the Sun-1, Sun-2, and Sun-3. Debugged first prototypes of Sun-1 and Sun-2, working with the hardware designer. Worked on first bringup ever of Unix on Motorola 68010 and 68020. Designed and diagnosed the chip designs for the SPARCstation-1 and SPARCstation-2. Straddled the hardware and software camps to locate, explain, and solve design, implementation, and manufacturing problems. Pulled many chestnuts out of fires. Debugged Unix utilities, kernel, device drivers, and CAD software. Diagnostics. Documentation. Electronic mail maintenance, support, and enhancement. Performance and code generation improvement. General technical support. Network relations. Contributed to lively corporate culture.
Back when I was a summer intern at Sun in 1987, it was common knowledge among the engineers at Sun that NFS stood for "No File Security", and the rpc mount protocol would trust the client to tell the server its host name, which the server would look up in /etc/exports to decide how much to trust it.
So if you know that Scott McNealy's workstation's name was "doober" (which it was), and it gave permission to a server named "mama", then on any workstation you could type:
% hostname mama; mount doober:/usr /mnt; hostname `hostname`
And you'd have Scott McNealy's /usr file system mounted.
This also worked over the internet!
"Vinod Khosla, first President of Sun, came to me at one point and said to put something hidden, triggered in an unexpected way, into the ROM Monitor, so that if somebody cloned the Sun Workstation (violating our software’s copyright), we could do that unexpected thing to the competitor’s demo workstation at a trade show and thereby prove that they had cloned it."
"I had found that saying years before on a hand-painted sign tacked up on a pole or tree in central Pennsylvania, wrote it into one of my notebooks at the time, and plucked it out as the hidden thing after Vinod asked."
By the way, I read your quote twice but I can't find any mention of NSA and DES backdoors.
There was definitely no DES software in the Sun boot ROMs, and the DES chips were optional and rarely used. If there was any DES software in the boot ROMs, it would have been illegal to ship Sun Workstations overseas, since DES software was officially considered an export controlled munition.
To address that problem, John funded and helped build Deep Crack [1], a hardware DES cracker, whose purpose was to prove that it was well within the capabilities of the NSA to crack DES (which they lied to deny), since EFF could do it for a few hundred thousands of dollars.
They published a book with the VHDL source code so you could build you own, which didn't include a floppy disk because that would have been considered a munition, so they printed the checksummed source code in the book along with software to reliably bootstrap scanning it in and validating it. (Like a software error correcting paper floppy disk, to get around the stupid export control laws.)
>In 1998, the EFF built Deep Crack for less than $250,000. In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 15, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. This was the final blow to DES, against which there were already some published cryptanalytic attacks. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. Most governments and large corporations could reasonably build a machine like Deep Crack.
>Six months later, in response to RSA Security's DES Challenge III, and in collaboration with distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day – 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended Triple DES.
>The small key-space of DES, and relatively high computational costs of Triple DES resulted in its replacement by AES as a Federal standard, effective May 26, 2002.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
Love your country but never trust its government.
-- from a hand-painted road sign in central PennsylvaniaThe article is a little confusing but it looks like an email reply to multiple questions, the first one "Why this message" and the second one "Why the empty chip slot". (And the third one about a Sun-2 emulator, which also comes out of nowhere.)
This is all very interesting information on DES and John Gilmore.
But I was only wondering if choosing to put just that phrase in just that DES chip initialization code could have been a reference to the alleged backdooring of DES by NSA.
Most possibly an idle question, so please, move on!
NSA asked for (and got) a key strength reduction in DES and a set of mysterious changes to the algorithm's substitution tables ("s-boxes"). For a long time, there were murmurs that those unexplained s-box changes weakened DES so that NSA could cryptanalyze it.
It turned out, though, that the s-box changes strengthened DES against a class of attacks that NSA knew about and few others did: the s-box changes made it much harder to employ differential cryptanalysis against the cipher.
The key strength reduction obviously (especially in retrospect) wasn't a good thing, but by the 1990s any competent engineer could make a clear-eyed decision about the key strength they wanted, and, if DES's wasn't adequate for their application, could deploy either a different cipher, or Triple DES.
Same as always, rather.
I usually use wikiquote to verify attribution, but this one is not mentioned there. Is there any proof, or is this simply the most popular attribution? Sadly, most are simply popular, which has led me to be suspicious.
http://www.sans.edu/research/security-laboratory/article/log...
For those who aren't familiar with this, up until the mid-1990s or so, Sun let individual engineers name their own workstations. In fact many regarded this as a privilege. Each workstation ran its own copy of sendmail, so one's email address was login@hostname. People came up with all kinds of clever login/hostname combinations, such as what Don mentioned, eat@joes.
My all time favorite was Rich Burridge's, whose workstation was named "stard". Since his login was richb, his email address was...
richb@stard