On Tue, Jun 10, 1997 at 12:12:36PM -0700, Phil Helms wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Bill Stewart wrote:
and you have potentially decent business reasons for backup of storage keys, but that's only the case if you're not using a sufficiently flexible cryptosystem and are using key backup instead of data backup, which is really the preferred approach anyway.)
I could envision situations where you wouldn't want to backup plaintext, but only ciphertext. In those situations, key backup would also be necessary. This would require the use of passphrases or some other tokens to utilize the backed up keys.
If you have data you wish to guard from disclosure I think that in most circumstances you want to back up ciphertext. It is a *lot* cheaper to secure a piece of paper with a passphrase on it (in a safe deposit box, for example) than it is guard a gigabyte of backup tapes. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html