Netintercept and SSH Decryption

Jonathan Hutchins hutchins at tarcanfel.org
Thu Nov 20 16:35:35 CST 2003


There's a spyware program advertised in the December SysAdmin, Netintercept 
from www.sandstorm.net.  Clearly pitched for employers to spy on employee 
activity, it offers some disturbing features:

"View Email, Webpages, Images & File Contents".  "Guaranteed Invisible & 
Silent on Your Network".  "Custom Reports Including Cleartext Passwords".

This is not exceptional, except for the hint that they're decrypting 
passwords, which might not be necessary if they can link to the actual hosts 
and pull them from the original password files.  

More troubling though is this:

"Patent Pending SSH & SSL Decryption".

Now, I know that the government has been pressing encryption providers to 
leave back doors for NSA and other "legitimate" surveillance, but I didn't 
think that SSH had caved on this.  I was under the impression that SSH was 
still un-cracked.  Can they actually offer to decrypt SSH streams now?




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