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By the way, just so everyone knows, I understand (based on a conversation with Steve Kent, who should be a reliable source for this) that Microsoft is one of the suppliers to the upcoming DMS, or defense messaging system. The DMS will be using Tessera -- it means that Microsoft and several other firms are going to be the largest purveyors of escrowed software in the world.
Well, no, not actually; at least that's not the explanation that the various trade rags have been giving. DMS is an infrastructure for passing messages around. The actual Tessera hardware does the escrowed encryption and so on. All the software has to do is know how to talk to the Tessera PCMCIA card. One of the key features of DMS is that it uses as much commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software as possible. To support Tessera, that COTS must either a) be purpose-built (like LJL/SESI's ArmorMail) to use Tessera, or b) have new versions planned for the future (Lotus Notes? MS Mail?) It's interesting to note that the APIs needed to talk to a Tessera card and National Semi's RSA-only card are very close to one another. It would be IMHO not too hard to patch, say, MS Mail (especially with the availability of MAPI!) to use alternate types of tokens. - -Paul - -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | "Information is the currency of democracy." perobich@ingr.com | - some old guy named Thomas Jefferson Of course I don't speak for Intergraph. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQCVAgUBLjgD2qfb4pLe9tolAQEejwP/bNbkE8auYcbBqRCWSx2D0gpzs5W+7A/m tL2c0dEA5ISMAWvwE51SixWBIf3kiT5+CBOh2ZNGEYd/oabynHEBXdYUQPYgaQ9E 9pG2wySN+aaSiGTypD7+jjIW3NVWgVKIzOWokixiQfh+W3e3ACASiuy986ZifJww 2C7C1IBGC8Y= =RDYy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----