At 10:00 AM -0700 7/23/97, Tim May wrote:
And when people repeatedly point out that common criminals, terrorists, and the like are unlikely in the extreme to escrow their keys with the government...the government shills and officials are silent.
I can't resist. "When crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto." However, in the case of crypto, essentially all terrorists, child pornographers, big-time drug dealers, and big-time money launderers will have and use it. To try to redeem myself for yielding to temptation let me offer the following scenario: It is sometime in the year 2002. The GAK crowd has achieved its wildest wet dream, and all development of non-GAKed crypto stopped in 1998. All the standard computer software uses GAKed crypto. Let us further assume that US Airframes Inc. (USAI) is in heavy competition with French Wings Inc. to build the next generation of passenger airplanes. The competition is so heavy that the respective governments are doing all they can to provide under-the-table help to their national champions. This certainly includes playing the GAK card and decrypting every communication they can get their hands on. Now assume you are the security manager of USAI. Your job is to ensure the confidentiality of communications between your branch offices and headquarters in the US. You get (perhaps from someone who enjoys child pornography) a copy of PGP which was saved on some forgotten CDROM backup dating from 1997. You share your copy with headquarters and the branch offices, generate key pairs, and validate their MD5 hashes through some offline protocol. Now all really sensitive traffic is encrypted with PGP and then sent through the standard GAK crypto. Now consider the problem of the French Government. The only way they can know you are using illegal crypto is to decrypt the GAKed outer layer. If they arrest you for using illegal crypto, they have blown their covert monitoring. The US government will make a big international incident about this misuse of GAK and impose a special tariff on French wine. If the French keep quiet, you can continue to use PGP. This is the classic dilemma of covert decryption. Kahn describes is well in "The Code Breakers". It also applies to the four horsemen. If the government arrests someone for illegal crypto, the whole organization knows that part of the operation has attracted government attention, and can change their communications and/or have those people take a vacation to cool off. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA