A former government contractor says that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation installed a number of back doors into the encryption software used by the OpenBSD operating system. The allegations were made public Tuesday by Theo de Raadt, the lead developer in the OpenBSD project.
DeRaadt posted an email sent by the former contractor, Gregory Perry, so that the matter could be publicly scrutinized.

"The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for nearly 10 years," he wrote in his a posting to an OpenBSD discussion list. "I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this. Therefore I am making it public."

No one has come forward to corroborate Perry's story, but the allegations are remarkable. If they're true -- and at present they're being greeted with skepticism by the security community -- they mean that the FBI may have developed secret ways to snoop on encrypted traffic and then hidden them in source code submissions accepted by OpenBSD.

The link for this article located at InfoWorld is no longer available.