According to a former government contractor who worked on the OpenBSD operating system, the FBI installed back doors into the encryption algorithms. This would have given them access to snoop on data that would have otherwise been near impossible to access. The allegations were made public on Tuesday by the lead developer in the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt.
In a message sent to Raadt by George Perry, he states:
My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason
Wright and several other developers were responsible for those
backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code
commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with
originating from NETSEC.
Very serious accusations that could completely undermine the OpenBSD Operating system. It seems interesting that Raadt would go public with this and not try to handle it discretely. OpenBSD is a popular OS for many critical systems. In a message to the OpenBSD discussion list, Raadt says:
“The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for nearly 10 years. I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this. Therefore I am making it public.”
via Computer World