At 9:49 PM -0600 12/4/96, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
this is unfortunate -- key escrow is a very good thing as long as it is not mandated by law.
Agreed, except that I would call voluntary, corporate plans "key recovery," not "key escrow." (The government now calls their non-voluntary system "key recovery" as well, so the term is still overloaded.) The concern many of us have had for several years (*) is that such schemes are very dangerous, acting as a kind of "sword of Damocles" over our heads. A widely-used, government-encouraged key recovery program, once deployed, could too easily be made mandatory. Hence our interest in sabotaging or subverting such schemes, to preserve additional degrees of freedom should a ban be attempted. And clearly even corporate key recovery schemes are not really designed to be robust against willful attempts to subvert the recovery of plaintext. The intention is to deal with forgetful employees, departed employees, etc., not those who attempt to, for example, superencrypt their communications. Furthermore--and this has been noted many, many times--there are essentially no plausible situations in which either _corporations_ or _individuals_ would need or want key recovery for *communications*. After all, individuals or employees within corporations have (possibly) encrypted files on their disks, including outgoing and incoming e-mail. They use communications cryptography--PGP, whatever--to guard against _interception_ by other corporations, other individuals, or governments (including their own). For example, they encrypt using the public key of their recipient. So, why would someone practicing such communications security care about key recovery, for the communications? Only one word suffices here: "Duh." On other hand, _governments_ are thwarted by such communications security, and this is the real motivation for key recovery. Louis Freeh, Jim Kallstrom, Dorothy Denning, and others have said as much.
any reasonable employer concerned about secrecy and recoverability of his data should use key escrow solutions for their employees' encryption.
But certainly not for *communications security*. Corporations such as Microsoft would do well, I think, to explicitly point this out and to make clear that corporate key recovery products will be oriented toward key recovery for files stored on corporate computers--which would presumably include the originally-generated plaintext messages sent to other sites or users--and not oriented toward mandating the forms the _communications_ must take. Sadly, most journalists who write about crypto have failed to pick up on this important point....I guess writing articles about the "death of the Cypherpunks list" is more important (and keeps Vulis feeling good about himself). Oh well. (* Just as the Cypherpunks list was being formed, circa October 1993, I posted an article to sci.crypt about "A Trial Balloon to Ban Encryption?" This was based on some views expressed by Prof. Dorothy Denning, who even then, six months before Clipper, was making arguments for government access to keys. I anticipated a government move to limit public key encryption, using some form of key escrow. Sure enough....) --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."