At 4:46 PM 9/19/96, Ray Arachelian wrote:
Another thing you can do: generate huge key pairs all day long and submit them to the NSA. If enough people do this, they will be flooded and overworked, of course they may ignore them, etc, or make it hard to do so, but if everyone generates a 4K key every hour or two and discards it, but gives the key pair to the NSA anyway, they will run out of storage space, or at least it will make it much much harder for them to figgure out which key you are using for conversation X.
Ah, but what about the _fee_ for registering a key? You really didn't think this would be free, did you? (It costs money to register cars, guns, etc., so why would it be "free" to register a key?) Besides being a revenue enhancement tool, charging a fee stops this sort of flooding attack. (Note: One of my biggest objections to GAK, besides the political/civil rights issue, is what it does to systems which generate lots and lots of keys on an ad hoc, continuing basis. GAK, if enforced, puts a major speed bump in the way and increases costs, possibly making certain kinds of systems infeasible.) --Tim May 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: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."