Slashdot Mirror
North Korea Introduces 'Secure' E-mail
An anonymous reader sent in a strange little story running over at ZD that discusses North Korea's new secure email system. There's a lot of strange bits in there about trained North Korean hackers, and the fact that North Korea's news agency is hosted in Japan.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that when you get mail from a `Korean' country code, the registry means South Korea. I, personally, can't remember ever seeing North Korean spam.
Indeed they are extremely concerned about spies and sabateurs (sp?). North Korea continues to be responsible for many provocative acts, including the murder of military personnel inside the the DMZ, the digging of invasion tunnels under the border, terrorist attacks in South Korea, etc.
The South has good reason to be paranoid.
Well, North Korea is not democratic at ALL, so South Korea (where you have elections, protests, etc) is the more democratic.
As far as being paranoid, I think the South is quite paranoid and with good reason. North Korean spies reguarly travel into the south, through a large network of tunnels under the DMZ. NK agents have kidnapped Japanese and South Koreans dozens of times in the past 40 years. South Korea is often infiltrated by North Korean spies who get into the country via small submarines.
From what I understand, cold war Berlin was nothing compared to what's been going on in Korea since the 60s.
... and this scares me. Although I spent most of my teen age years + university life over in Canada, I've lived in Korea for good 14 years. As I grew up, there are bad and goodo things to be heard about people "up" there. One thing, I heard was the rumour that researches results achieved by North Korean top university happens to be better than the best university in South. I've also heard about the top University in North actually does have a better ranking (think North American university rankings published annually) than the top university in South. Now, these are my conspiracy theories about why the posted story is a possible scenario. 1) North Korea maybe forging research result. BUT they do not seem to joke about Nuclear bombs :-) I think they do have potential to acquire "bleeding-edge" cryptography, but probably will take a while to mature.
2) ONLY a few selected children of high ranking government officials get educated. And I assume these are very smart people since the government in places like North Korea wouldn't waste money.
3) There have been spies from North in South. (duh!) BUT some of these spies lived their lives as a professor/researcher at some university, etc etc. (this is TRUE, scary) What else could have they been doing?
4) North Korea will likely disobey any laws about cryptography exports and so on. The algorithm and all the math required are published. I assume using/implementing them just requires one smart brain. :-) I guess this point essentially applies to terrorists as well.
5) Don't forget all that money South gave to North a few years ago. Sure, it wouldn't have been enough money to last for long, but it was cerntainly known that
a) North Korea didn't spend money for the
public
b) The amount of "financial aid" given to
North was enough to make South Korean money
reservoir dry. People actually blame the
_previous_ president for this.
6) The site is hosted in _Japan_ *gasp*. Believe it or not, Japanese always seem to win computer hackerish war over Koreans. For my short period of exposure to Open Source/BSD community tells me that Japanese are faaar deeper into hacker community then Koreans. What doees this mean? I'm probably about to say, North Korean could've got some Japanese hackers working secretly?
One interesting note though. I believe North Koreans have their webpages too (for probably 3 years?). It's been a while since I heard of debates in Korea about "Hmm. Should we allow our South dudes to see these North Korean webpages?" I think the resolution was to require government permission to access those pages.
SOrry about long conspiracy theory. :-)
And I'll post anonymously because I don't want to get arrested!