Former contractor says FBI put back door in OpenBSD

IDG News Service - A former government contractor says that the FBI installed a number of back doors into the encryption software used by the OpenBSD operating system.

The allegations were made public Tuesday by Theo de Raadt, the lead developer in the OpenBSD project. DeRaadt posted an e-mail sent by the former contractor, Gregory Perry, so that the matter could be publicly scrutinized.

"The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for nearly 10 years," he wrote in his a posting to an OpenBSD discussion list. "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."

No one has come forward to corroborate Perry's story, but the allegations are remarkable. If they're true -- and at present they're being greeted with skepticism by the security community -- they mean that the FBI may have developed secret ways to snoop on encrypted traffic and then hidden them in source code submissions accepted by OpenBSD.

Perry is now CEO with a VMware services company called GoVirtual, but 10 years ago -- when the backdoor code was allegedly added to OpenBSD's IPsec stack -- he was a government contractor working for the FBI, he said.


Read the entire article:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9201220/Former_contractor_says_FBI_put_back_door_in_OpenBSD

Related:
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/130820/openbsdfbi-allegations-denied-named-participant