NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)

I think Lotus Notes has a fascinating history, cryptographic shenanigans asides. As far as I'm aware it is still the most successful "offline first" / "local-first" application platform in widespread use today, complete with multi-master document replication, highly-configurable conflict resolution and rapid application development. These were revolutionary capabilities during the dialup era. The email client just happens to be the most popularly recognised groupware application outside of individual corporate…

Ray Ozzie here. Regarding "minitruth" - you've got to maintain a bit of a sense of humor when things get stressful. It was such a long time ago, but one thing that clearly differentiates our efforts in those days vs. what's been reported in the news in the past few days is the issue of transparency. The day we shipped the "differential workfactor" implementation in Notes, I keynoted the RSA Conference and gave a speech laying out what we did…

It’s worth reading Ray Ozzie’s (Lotus Notes creator)’s comment on this from a HN 2013 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 Before the software was released, Ray Ozzie and Kauffman openly described what they were doing at an RSA conference. This was not a secret back door. It was compliance with export controls everybody in the industry dealt with. Also worth reading barrkel’s comment a couple comments down…

From Ray Ozzie himself in a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189