Trust, Transparency, and Treachery: What the Friedman–Hagelin Agreement Teaches OT Security Professionals

A Cold War handshake that compromised global cryptography – and a modern reminder that in connected systems, unverified trust is the most dangerous vulnerability of all.

Through the lens of the Friedman–Hagelin cryptographic agreement, this talk explores how a secret handshake led to decades of compromised encryption, and what Cold War deception can teach today’s OT and ICS engineers about trust, transparency, and supply chain integrity in connected systems.

Program Description

Following the popular session “Encryption, Engineering, and Errors,” this new talk examines how a quiet handshake between American cryptographer William Friedman and Swedish engineer Boris Hagelin set the stage for one of the longest-running intelligence operations in history. Their “gentleman’s agreement” secretly weakened commercial encryption for decades. This decision offers striking parallels to today’s industrial cybersecurity challenges. Through a historical lens, attendees will explore how hidden dependencies, opaque supply chains, and unverified trust relationships can undermine modern OT and ICS systems, and how traditional engineering principles can help us design transparency, verification, and ethical integrity into connected infrastructure.