NSA Codenames/Covernames and Suggested Use/Implementation
This page contains a listing of covernames associated with the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA is responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance services to the United States government.
I have produced similar lists for Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). You may also want to visit Electrospaces.net, which has also developed lists of covernames for some of the above mentioned agencies.
In some cases, you may find that covernames are listed across different agencies. This results from how covernames lists have often been created, which involved close reading of documents that were associated with different agencies and then listing covernames under the agency which authored the documents. In all cases, I would suggest you search across agency covername lists when researching a given covername.
Most of the material provided below is derived from publicly available documents, books, and other resources. Unlike other covername guides, however, we have included some which are derived from the 2016 NSA Tool dump and thus exceed what was contained in the Snowden documents, and which had previously been listed at https://musalbas.com/blog/2016/08/16/equation-group-firewall-operations-catalogue.html (this URL is now only accessible using the Wayback machine). Descriptions of what the covernames mean or refer to are done on a best-effort basis; if you believe there is additional publicly referenced material derived from NSA documents which could supplement descriptions please let me know. In all cases, we have sought to cite sentences/passages of analysis to specific texts or sources.
