Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 16:38:02 CDT From: m5@vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) Subject: Re: Clipper Chip Retreat
Carl Ellison writes:
Sorry, but the major Clipper flaw to me (and at least one corporate executive with whom I've discussed this) *is* the very idea of key escrow.
Agreed; however, I don't see what good (from the standpoint of the key escrow fan club) a non-classified Skipjack would be, other than to make the banning of non-escrowed cryptography "ineluctable".
I don't care about Skipjack. If they want to publish, I'd read the paper, but I'm plenty content with triple-DES for routine stuff and DTDTD (des|tran|...) for more sensitive stuff. (ditto with IDEA variants) By key length, triple-DES is far more secure than Skipjack -- and probably faster. I don't remember the Clipper data rate off hand, but I just timed RSAREF triple-DES (CBC) on my 66 MHz 486 (running Mach) at 112 KBytes/sec. (That's just short of 1 Mb/sec.) That would do for telephone speeds :-). - Carl