North Korea has developed its own system of encryption, according to two researchers who presented their findings at a conference on Sunday.
“(Late leader) Kim Jong Il said North Korea should develop a system of their own,” German IT researcher Florian Grunow told Reuters before the presentation, delivered at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. “This is what they’ve done.”
North Korea has been developing the Red Star OS, a form of intranet that precludes users from connecting with the outside world, since 2002. The system comes with its own firewalls, antivirus software and built-in surveillance tools. After downloading the software from outside North Korea and examining the code, Grunow and a colleague, Niklaus Schiess, discovered that it also came with its own form of encryption.
“This is a full-blown operation system where they control most of the code,” Grunow added. “They may want to be independent of other operating systems because they fear backdoors,” which would allow foreign intelligence services to surveil what takes place on the North Korean web.
As part of its surveillance regime, the Red Star OS also places a unique watermark on every document or media file on a system connected to it, allowing every file to be traced to its origin. “It’s definitely privacy invading, it’s not transparent to the user,” Grunow said. “It’s done stealthily, and touches files you haven’t even opened.”
Russia, China, and Cuba have also attempted to develop operating systems of their own. Cuba developed an operating system called “Nova” in 2009, though it has yet to achieve nationwide implementation.
Lawmakers in the United States have spent the last several months debating whether American companies like Apple should be required to install “backdoors” in their encryption systems. Advocates of such backdoors believe they would help intelligence officials to monitor criminal activity. Opponents have suggested that such laws would make U.S. citizens more vulnerable while doing nothing to deter alternatives for encryption abroad. The latter is an argument that the report on North Korea is likely to buoy.
“A lot of other countries are looking to use this topic as a way to push and promote an even larger assault on human rights than anything anyone would imagine here in the United States,” Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, told reporters on Dec. 18.
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“It really is a global problem, and there are a lot of other actors out there that we need to be watching and mindful of in helping our industry … push back,” Hurd added.
