NSA

I joined Secure Computing about a year after it came into existence. It was called "Secure Computing Technology Corporation" at the time. By the time I left, they'd gone through three more company presidents, 4 corporate logos, several mergers, and bounced the corporate headquarters from Minnesota to Silicon Valley.

Boak didn't quite explain how they disposed of the waste. Instead, he coded the answer using an innocent text system and challenged the readers to solve it.

GregoryF's solution is posted as a comment to the earlier article. He actually came up with two different solutions. The "system" behind the second solution gets somewhat complicated, which casts some doubt on its correctness. Also, I haven't quite recovered the same results.

Spoilers ahead!

The NSA had an incinerator in their old Arlington Hall facility that was designed to reduce top secret crypto materials and such to ash. Someone discovered that it wasn't in fact working. Contract disposal trucks had been disposing of this not-quite-sanitized rubish, and officers tracked down a huge pile in a field in Ft. Meyer.

How did they dispose of it? The answer is encrypted in the story's text!

I was particularly astonished to see inclusion of a video about the Pluribus - a long-obsolete Arpanet-era packet switch. I worked on the beast: it was overbuilt and underpowered. And unreliable (more on that another time). In the ideal world of tech, such obsolete junk should have been recycled by 1991. I was optimistic.

Words of the President are obviously valuable, whether voice or text. Even if we ignore spies, think about the interest they carry for news reporters, government contractors, political operatives, and other presumed patriots. So, to start with, we have to ensure that the President's words are only released when he decides to do so.

The government has established several strategies for protecting information assets. While we don't necessarily know what they're doing in the White House, we can make some educated guesses. The problems, and solutions, revolve around multilevel security, also called MLS.

Take a look at the following image. You should see two different 'messages' here.

  Two messages

This particular mis-mash of messages reflects the failure of otherwise strong cryptography: the improper implementation of a one-time pad or a stream cipher.

As computer costs fell and performance soared during the 1980s and 1990s, computer networks became essential for sharing work and resources. Long before computers were routinely wired to the Internet, sites were building local area networks to share printers and files. In the defense community, multilevel data sharing had to be addressed in a networking environment. Initially, the community embraced networks of cheap computers as a way to temporarily sidestep the MLS problem. Instead of tackling the problem of data sharing, many organizations simply deployed separate networks to operate at different security levels, each running in system high mode.