> without a 'hint' (true or fake),
Well, the allegations came without any facts pointing at specific code.
At the moment my beliefs are somewhat along these lines:
(a) NETSEC, as a company, was in that peculiar near-DC business
of accepting contracts to do security and anti-security work
from parts of the government.
(b) For context: 1999-2001 was a period where lots of US govt
departments pushed the boundaries, because crypto was moved
from DOD to Commerce so that it could be exported "subject
to some limits"; the result was that crypto use by private
interests was set to explode, and thus many justifications, not
just technologies, were being invented to let the US Govt
continue wiretapping (they have always been addicted to it).
(c) Gregory Perry did work at NETSEC, and interviewed and hired Jason
just out of school; by the time Jason started working there
Perry had been "evicted" from the company, for reasons unknown.
(d) Jason did not work on cryptography specifically since he was
mostly a device driver author, but did touch the ipsec layer
because that layer does IPCOMP as well. Meaning he touched the
data-flow sides of this code, not the algorithms.
(e) After Jason left, Angelos (who had been working on the ipsec stack
already for 4 years or so, for he was the ARCHITECT and primary
developer of the IPSEC stack) accepted a contract at NETSEC and
(while travelling around the world) wrote the crypto layer that
permits our ipsec stack to hand-off requests to the drivers that
Jason worked on. That crypto layer contained the half-assed
insecure idea of half-IV that the US govt was pushing at that time.
Soon after his contract was over this was ripped out. Soon after
this the CBC oracle problem became known as well in published
papers, and ipsec/crypto moved towards random IV ...
