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From: James_Linn@nortel.com (James Linn)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 1996 10:15:15 -0400

In article <sticherd-2006962021510001@ppp13.global2000.net>, sticherd@globalone.net (Prince Vermillion) wrote:

> I got this one off of the WWW. Is it true or not?

Lets take this one step at a time and show why this is patently false.

>
> --------------------------[true or false?]-----------------------------
>
> ... (many forwards deleted)...
>
> This falls into the "Why did it have to happen on *MY* shift?" category.
>
> A friend of mine is a chief engineer at SuperMac, and he related this
> story to me.
>

SuperMac was a HARDWARE company. They made monitors and video cards and hard disks for Macs. The only software they ever wrote or sold was drivers for hardware.

> SuperMac records a certain number of technical support calls at random,
> to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. By wild "luck", they managed to
> catch the following conversation on tape.

From help desk experience, monitoring is usually done live. Correcting some poor support guy the next day is not nearly as effective as correcting them at the time. Those of you who've trained puppies may understand this well.

> Some poor SuperMac TechSport got a call from some middle level official...
> from the legitimate government of Trinidad. The fellow spoke very good
> English, and fairly calmly described the problem.

Well of course they spoke very good English. As a former British colony, it is their official language.

A link to a Trinidad and Tobago homepage (http://caribbean-www.lcs.mit.edu/caribbean-www/islands/tnt/) shows that "The old French-based patois has almost died out; some Hindi is still used among the Indian community. "

> It seemed there was a coup attempt in progress at that moment. However,
> the national armoury for that city was kept in the same building as the
> Legislature, and it seems that there was a combination lock on the door
> to the armoury. Of the people in the capitol city that day, only the
> Chief of the Capitol Guard and the Chief Armourer knew the combination to
> the lock, and they had already been killed.

The fact that the national armoury would be in the same building as the legislature seems "fishy" to me. This is not some tinpot dictatorial government here, but a peaceful former British colony, with a democratically elected government. Its also disputed in the letter quoted below.

> So, this officer of the government of Trinidad continued, the problem is
> this. The combination to the lock is stored in a file on the Macintosh,
> but the file has been encrypted with the SuperMac product called Sentinel.
> Was there any chance, he asked, that there was a "back door" to the
> application, so they could get the combination, open the armoury door,
> and defend the Capitol Building and the legitimately elected government
> of Trinidad against the insurgents?

In 1994 I conducted an extensive review of Macintosh security software. Sentinel did not exist as a software package. There is a product called Sentinel which is a dongle sold by Rainbow products. A dongle is a hardware device you attach to a serial port (sometimes parallel) which some types of software use to verify the legitimacy of the ownership. Often used by high end CAD programs costing thousands of dollars (and almost exclusively on the PC platform). Given the longstanding existance of the Sentinel dongle, I am highly dubious that another product could have the same name. We are talking America here, where there are lawyers just aching to sue.

As a former desktop computer security guy, I can tell you that you would have to verify one's identity somehow before getting tech support to try and subvert security. Been there - passwords, signatures, letters of authorization from senior executives etc. You can't just call up, and say, "Gee I forgot my password, can you help me break in?". Think about how absurd that is.

> All the while he is asking this in a very calm voice, there is the sound
> of gunfire in the background. The Technical Support guy put the person on
> hold. A phone call to the phone company verified that the origin of the
> call was in fact Trinidad. Meanwhile, there was this mad scramble to see
> if anybody knew of any "back doors" in the Sentinel program.
>
> As it turned out, Sentinel uses DES to encrypt the files, and there was
> no known back door. The Tech Support fellow told the customer that aside
> from trying to guess the password, there was no way through Sentinel, and
> that they'd be better off trying to physically destroy the lock.

The DES encryption algorthym is classified as a munition by the US government and cannot be exported outside of the US and Canada. Go to the store and read the boxes people (Try Symantec's Disklock for example). In France, where it is considered a munition as well, you have to get a permit to import such software.

This doesn't preclude the fact that someone might have bought it in the states and stuck it in their briefcase. But governments would try and avoid such embarrasments.

There are many people (other the NSA which have the backdoor, as its their algorithym) who could break the DES encryption, given enough time and horsepower. In 1990, it was beyond the means of most, unless you had access to a supercomputer.

> The official was very polite, thanked him for the effort, and hung up.
> That night, the legitimate government of Trinidad fell. One of the BBC
> reporters mentioned that the casualties seemed heaviest in the capitol,
> where for some reason, there seemed to be little return fire from the
> government forces.

This is where the story falls to pieces. I point you to a letter which debunks this theory totally;

http://www.eff.org/pub/Security/Security/Hacking_cracking_phreaking/Net_culture_ and_hacking/Folklore/Humor/encryption_foils_coup.response

The orginal posting in a previous issue of the above newsletter can be found at
http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/marchives/ece/0201.html

another debunking occurs in

http://snyside.sunnyside.com/cpsr/lists/rre/CPU.015_Working_in_the_Compute

The coup was not successful, the governement did not fall, the casualties were light. The return fire was low because the attackers took hostages. After 6 days they gave up.

In reseraching this on the Web, I found this story, told verbatim, on many humour or joke pages, as well as some computer newsletters which reported this as fact. The story seems not to have vectored at all, but remained a copy and paste job, and survived intact. Interesting that.

This is a relatively easy one to debunk, but yet it persists (first sightings through Alta Vista, Sept 1995). You have to wonder why.

Having borne the brunt of many users opposed to the concept of security software on their workplace computers, I have to think that stories like the above UL exist because of a deep seated mistrust of technology. Look what could happen if we trust technology too much. Why, the government might fall.

James "insecure people are usually more of a problem than insecure computers" Linn
My opinions are MINE,MINE,MINE!!!