Police break codes

From the cryptography mailing list, 7th August 2001

>Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:24:35 -0400
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>To: politech@politechbot.com
>Cc: bo.elkjaer@eb.dk
>Subject: FC: Danish police break "Safeguard" encryption program in tax case
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>[From the cryptography mailing list. --Declan]
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>**********

>Subject: Utimacos Safeguard Easy broken by danish police in tax evation ca
> se
>Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 22:51:08 +0200
>
>The german encryption program Safeguard Easy has been broken by the danish
>police. Today the police from the city Holstebro in Jutland presented
>evidence in court, that was provided after breaking the encryption on five
>out of sixteen computers that where seized april 25 this year.
>
>All 16 computers were protected with Safeguard Easy from the german
>encryption provider Utimaco. It is not known whether DES, 128-bit IDEA,
>Blowfish or Stealth was used as algorithm on the computers. All four
>algorithms are built in Safeguard Easy. Details are sparse. It is not known
>how the encryption was broken, whether it was brute forced or flaws in the
>program was exploited.
>
>The computers where seized from the humanitarian (leftwing) foundation Tvind
>(Humana) in connection with a case about tax evation. Among the evidence
>provided from the encrypted computers were emails sent among the leaders of
>the foundation, Poul Jorgensen and Mogens Amdi Petersen describing transfers
>of large sums of money.
>
>Apparantly, but not confirmed, british Scotland Yard has been involved in
>breaking the encryption. The danish police doesn't have the capacity to
>break encryption by themselves. Neither has the danish civilian intelligence
>service. Routine is that cases concerning encryption is handed over to the
>danish defence intelligence service DDIS. This procedure has been described
>earlier this year by the danish minister of justice in connection with
>another case. DDIS denies involvement with the Tvind case.
>
>Employees and leaders at Tvind has denied handing over their passwords to
>the computers. One even wrote a public letter mocking the chief of police in
>Holstebro, describing how he changed his password weekly, and stating that
>he'd probably even forgotten his password by now. At a time, the police
>concidered putting employees in custody until passwords were handed over.

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