
Why the NSA Called Me After Midnight and Requested My Source Code - brunoluiz
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/why-the-nsa-called-me-after-midnight-and-requested-my-source-code-f7076c59ab3d
======
ihuman
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18293940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18293940)

------
anonlastname
Strange that they would need the source code. I would think that it should be
easy to figure out what encryption algorithm it uses by looking at the binary
if it wasn't blatantly advertised anyway.

~~~
dnautics
one guess might be they wanted to know exactly how the software seeded the
PRNG, to cut down their search space dramatically.

~~~
shittyadmin
The binary would tell them that - in fact, it'd tell them that better than the
source if there were any overlaps into garbage memory for example.

Wanting the source is purely for speedy analysis.

~~~
dnautics
I've never done windows (95?) disassembly, but from what little VSC++ I did
back in the day, for the sake of speed, I would probably have wanted to see
the source code instead of disassembling! Don't know how good at this stuff
the NSA was back then.

------
powerbroker
Why is it midnight when the NSA calls, in Connecticut (EST), and 1AM when he
calls to his partner, IN CALIFORNIA, for the source code?

~~~
cpr
Must have been 4 hours later?

