Donate for the Cryptome archive of files from June 1996 to the present


27 January 2015

NSA MORECOWBELL


A sends:

Here are a few docs for Cryptome about the latest Snowden leak published by Le Monde in France three days ago on the NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center’s MORECOWBELL program:

1. The PPT presentation slides, U.S. National Security Agency, NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center (NTOC), Cyber Profiling and Operations Support (V43), “(U) MORECOWBELL: (S/REL) A Covert HTTP/DNS Monitoring System for Operations Support,” Fort George G. Meade, MD:  no date, TOP SECRET/COMINT/REL FVEY,

https://data.awp.is/data/international/16/morecowbell.pdf

2. Link to the Le Monde story: Yves Eudes and Christian Grothoff, with Jacob Appelbaum, Monika Ermert, Laura Poitras and Matthias Wachs, “MORECOWBELL: Nouvelles révélations sur les pratiques de la NSA” (MORECOWBELL: New Revelations About the NSA’s Practices), Le Monde, January 24, 2015,

http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/visuel/2015/01/24/cowbells-nouvelles-revelations-sur-les-pratiques-de-la-nsa_4561547_3234.html#rmDPpQ6hAhZKqgPJ.99

3. A more detailed analysis of MORECOWBELL on GNUnet by Christian Grothoff, Matthias Wachs, Monika Ermert and Jacob Appelbaum, “NSA's MORECOWBELL: Knell for DNS,” Muenchen: GNUnet e.V., January 24, 2015,

https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/mcb-en.pdf

On a separate, but also very recent, issue related to NSA public key crypto work, here is the full article (and lame apology) of the former head of NSA Research in next month’s journal of the AMS about the back door installed in the dual EC DRBG algorithm:

Michael Wertheimer, “The Mathematics Community and the NSA: Encryption and the NSA Role in International Standards," (Part of series  Mathematicians Discuss the Snowden Revelations), Notices of the American Mathematical Society,  62:2 (February 2015), 165-167 [Former NSA Director of Research and former Assistant Deputy Director and CTO, ODNI],

http://www.ams.org//notices/201502/rnoti-p165.pdf

Cryptome mirrors:

MORECOWBELL.pdf

MORECOWBELL-Analysis-Grothoff-etal.pdf

Wertheim-NSA-and-Encryption-NotiAMS-Feb15.pdf