Crypto AG

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Crypto AG

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1952
resolution 2018
Seat Steinhausen ZG ( Switzerland )
Number of employees 80
Branch Information security

The Crypto AG based in Steinhausen ZG was an international company in the field of information security . The German foreign intelligence service BND and the US CIA secretly bought the company in 1970. They caused that many countries were supplied with machines with weaker encryption, which could be decrypted by the BND and CIA ( Operation Rubicon ). According to American information, back doors should not have been installed. Over 130 governments were customers of Crypto AG.

history

The prototype of the B-21 cipher machine from 1925

In 1915, the Swedish cryptologist , engineer and inventor Arvid Damm (1869-1927) founded the public limited company ( Swedish 'Aktiebolag') AB Cryptograph in the Swedish capital Stockholm . The purpose was to further develop, manufacture and sell the cipher machines he had devised . When the young company's capital ran out in 1921, he succeeded in hiring the Swedish industrialist and financier Emanuel Nobel (1859–1932), nephew of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), and his compatriot Karl Wilhelm Hagelin for further financial support Attract investment. At the request of investors, Hagelin's son, Boris Hagelin (1892–1983), who grew up in the Russian Empire and was 30 years old at the time , joined the company in 1922 to help with the management and as a technical advisor. Until 1925 he developed his first encryption machine there with the prototype of the B-21 (picture) . In the same year, shortly after Damm moved to France, Hagelin took over the management of AB Cryptograph . Damm died two years later in 1927. Hagelin reorganized the company and finally liquidated it in 1932.  

Immediately afterwards, in 1932, it was re-established under the new company AB Cryptoteknik ( German  Kryptotechnik AG ) with Boris Hagelin as managing director. After the Second World War , when the Swedish government regarded cipher machines as war devices and banned their export, Hagelin moved to Switzerland in 1948 with the intention of setting up a development laboratory for AB Cryptoteknik there. On May 13, 1952, he finally founded CRYPTO AG there .

Under the slogan Total Information Security, it developed and produced security solutions for the military, companies, private individuals, banks and governments. The first machine produced entirely in Switzerland was the C-52 , a further development of the C-36 that Boris Hagelin had sold to numerous nations and - under license (type M-209 ) - to the US armed forces before the Second World War . The other models were developed from the construction elements of the C-36. Boris Hagelin withdrew from his active work in the company when the technology of the encryption machines moved more and more towards electronics. The company logo with the orange "H" embodies - then as now - the first letter of its founder.

Together with the sister company Info Guard AG, founded in 1988, Crypto AG was organized until January 2018 under the umbrella of "The Crypto Group AG" based in Steinhausen. The international business of the Crypto International Group has been owned by the Swedish entrepreneur Andreas Linde since February 2018. The Swiss business was transferred to “Crypto Schweiz AG” as part of a management buyout. This was renamed “CyOne Security AG” on September 17, 2018.

Crypto AG had branches in Brazil , Malaysia , the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates .

In the Board of Crypto AG politicians such as were Rolf Schweiger (2014-2018) and Georg Stucky (from 1992 to 2016 which President 2002-2016) represented.

Products

CVX-396 voice encryption device

Crypto AG offered encryption for radio , telephone , VPN and fiber optics . Crypto AG grew up through the sale of radio equipment to governments for embassy radio. The encryption algorithms used are not public, the details are only known to a few employees of the global company. The algorithms are implemented according to the principle of security through obscurity . An assessment of the security by everyone is therefore not possible (due to the lack of disclosed source code).

Property by intelligence services

Crypto AG hit the headlines in 1996 because the company was suspected of having sold manipulated protective devices - with the help of German and US intelligence services - by the end of the 1980s. In 1996, the news magazine Der Spiegel dedicated issue 36 under the title Who is the Authorized Fourth? Secret services subvert the protection of encryption devices the business conduct of Crypto AG an article. In another critical report, MediaFilter.org deals with the interdependencies between Crypto AG and the technical US intelligence service NSA .

In 2013, in a ZDF report on the NSA affair, a former employee describes how he was forced to weaken a draft algorithm for encrypting data; several times and in consultation with the BND. The expert for intelligence services Erich Schmidt-Eenboom described the Crypto AG in this context as an "extended arm of the BND". According to him, the BND specifically built algorithms into the encryption systems of Crypto AG, which made it possible to decode the telecommunications of the more than 20 buyer countries. Both Crypto AG and BND denied this.

In February 2020, the published Swiss radio and television , ZDF and The Washington Post a common research evaluation of a 280-sided dossiers shows that the German BND and the American CIA were owners of Crypto AG and as part of Operation Rubicon of around 130 countries delivered manipulated encryption devices, which enabled third parties to decrypt communications.

literature

Videos

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry of "Crypto AG" in the commercial register of the Canton of Zug ( Memento from October 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ A b 'The intelligence coup of the century' , Washington Post, February 11, 2020
  3. ↑ Boris Hagelin: The history of the Hagelin cryptos. (PDF) Zug, Switzerland, 1979, pp. 2.-19
  4. ^ Fred B. Wrixon: Codes, Ciphers & Other Secret Languages. From the Egyptian hieroglyphs to computer cryptology. Könemann, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-8290-3888-7 , p. 601.
  5. ↑ The Crypto Group ( Memento from October 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Extract of the Zefix - Central Company Index, with the entry of Cyone Security AG , accessed on February 11, 2020
  7. ^ SOGC entry, Georg Stucky resigned as Chairman of the Board of Directors, accessed on February 29, 2020
  8. ^ Gordon Corera: How NSA and GCHQ spied on the world . July 28, 2015 ( bbc.com [accessed November 19, 2019]).
  9. ↑ Who is the Authorized Fourth? Secret services subvert the protection of encryption devices
  10. ↑ Cryptogate - Crypto AG: The NSAs Trojan Whore? ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ ZDF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGc125Sr1WA . Retrieved on May 29, 2014 in the ZDF media library
  12. ^ Secret service affair - Worldwide espionage operation with Swiss company uncovered. February 11, 2020, accessed February 11, 2020 .
  13. ↑ #Cryptoleaks: How BND and CIA deceived everyone. In: zdf.de. Retrieved February 11, 2020 .
  14. ↑ heise online: #Cryptoleaks: CIA and BND were behind the encryption company for decades. Retrieved February 11, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Book from 1994 on Archive.org
  16. ↑ A Technician's Tragedy. Tages-Anzeiger, February 12, 2020.
  17. ↑ Crypto AG in Zug - Switzerland on a secret mission (1/5) - TV. Retrieved February 24, 2020 .
  18. ↑ about the film