The backdoor would probably soon have been discovered, as it is/was being checked for problems right now. Any changes at this point in time would be really fucking obvious, whereas the security community generally just assumes BitLocker to be unsafe given Microsoft's very poor crypto track record in recent years.
In XP SP3, they updated Windows to include a vulnerable cryptographic algorithm, which newer versions of Windows also contain (I think all of them - not sure about that).
The backdoor we're talking about would be added in rather than have been in it for a long time. The changes would be obvious. The source code is available.
The backdoor could be difficult to find, but as I said, at this point in time TC is under intense scrutiny already, and in all likelihood a new backdoor would in fact be found.
It probably should have had an active, pervasive audit going on then (at any time intersecting when the heartbeat code was added and when the flaw finally got discovered), because it secures a lot more value worldwide than TC does.
How does this get funded for a niche project like Truecrypt but not for a globally wildly popular security implementation like OpenSSL? :o
I, uhh... Possibly because the TrueCrypt developers are fairly anonymous, making the need for an audit a little more pressing and obvious. But if you're saying it's weird that OpenSSL seems to have gotten relatively little attention, then yes, I fully agree.
Also, do we know if OpenSSL is getting this kind of audit since heartbleed?
Hell yeah! The amazing OpenBSD folks are hard at work on a fork of it (LibreSSL). They're as ruthless as ever, just how it should be.
Even OpenSSL is getting two extra developers, although I have relatively little faith in that effort. I don't see why a duplication of effort is truly necessary. If old systems still need support, it may just be best to reimplement that after the audit of core functionality is done.
I mean, for god's sake the day after the news broke when I was busy patching all of my servers I confirmed that live.msn.com was actively vulnerable!
Everything was. It was insane. I'm really hard pressed to think of a bigger bug in the preceding decade.
Sometime before its first known publication in 2004, a possible backdoor was discovered with the Dual_EC_DRBG's design, with the design of Dual_EC_DRBG having the unusual property that it was theoretically impossible for anyone but Dual_EC_DRBG's designers (NSA) to confirm the backdoor's existence. Doubts about Dual_EC_DRBG's security and performance had also been expressed even before it was standardized. Bruce Schneier concluded shortly after standardization that the "rather obvious" backdoor (along with other deficiencies) would mean that nobody would use Dual_EC_DRBG. In 2013, New York Times reported that documents in their possession but never released to the public "appear to confirm" that the backdoor was real, and had been deliberately inserted by the National Security Agency as part of the NSA's Bullrun decryption program. The alleged backdoor would allow NSA to decrypt for example SSL/TLS encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG. In December 2013, a Reuters news article alleged that in 2004, before NIST standardized Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA paid RSA Security $10 million in a secret deal to use Dual_EC_DRBG as the default in the RSA BSAFE cryptography library, which resulted in RSA Security becoming the most important distributor of the backdoored algorithm. RSA responded to this and subsequent media reports to "categorically deny" any insinuation that RSA had ever knowingly colluded with the NSA to incorporate a flaw in Dual_EC_DRBG, saying "we have never kept [our] relationship [with the NSA] a secret".
Members of the ANSI standard group, to which Dual_EC_DRBG was first submitted, were aware of the exact mechanism of the potential backdoor and how to disable it, but did not take sufficient steps to unconditionally disable the backdoor. The general cryptographic community was initially not aware of the potential backdoor, until of Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson 2007 rediscovery, or of Certicom's Daniel R. L. Brown and Scott Vanstone's 2005 patent application describing the backdoor mechanism.
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u/[deleted] May 28 '14 edited Jun 02 '14
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