I was doing some late night reading (https://publicintelligence.net/inspire-magazine-email-and-encryption-key-comparison/) when a paper on use of cryptography piqued my interest.
It seemed rather silly to develop your own encryption program. I take it back, it's very dumb to develop your own encryption program when your and your associates asses are on the line. Time and time again it has been shown that its extremely difficult to roll your own encryption well. This bodes well for law enforcement.
It's almost as if the tool was written by US agency to let terrorists use 'encryption' while ensuring all messages are seen by the agency.
Nobody seems to be able to get a copy of this tool to rip it apart and analyze it.
Mcafee has an opinion on this issue as well - http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/odd-magazine-disinformation-at-play
One thing that's really interesting is message blocks self identify themselves!
Go ahead, google “#—Begin Al-Ekhlaas Network ASRAR El Moujahedeen V2.0 Public Key 2048 bit—” and you will get research papers, advisories, and terrorist web sites like this little jem (http://bab-ul-islam.net/) that's 5th on google search results.
It's rather intersting where that string turns up - including shared space on pastebin (http://pastebin.com/w9t7L9g0). Probably for easy of exchange and harder to tie to a person/group/cell unlike an email account.
If this is a tool really used by terrorists and not a ruse by 3 letter agency it's got to be really damn easy to subpoena ISPs and grab messages with this content header, find senders/recipients and send in predator drones to 'investigate'.
One thing that's really interesting is message blocks self identify themselves!
Go ahead, google “#—Begin Al-Ekhlaas Network ASRAR El Moujahedeen V2.0 Public Key 2048 bit—” and you will get research papers, advisories, and terrorist web sites like this little jem (http://bab-ul-islam.net/) that's 5th on google search results.
It's rather intersting where that string turns up - including shared space on pastebin (http://pastebin.com/w9t7L9g0). Probably for easy of exchange and harder to tie to a person/group/cell unlike an email account.
If this is a tool really used by terrorists and not a ruse by 3 letter agency it's got to be really damn easy to subpoena ISPs and grab messages with this content header, find senders/recipients and send in predator drones to 'investigate'.
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