At 08:57 PM 11/9/98 -0800, Matthew James Gering wrote:
Yes, I assumed as much. But it is electronic circuits that are EMP/nuclear hardened, not the "encryption technology." ...... , encryption is mathematics, period. National security fearmongering to spite Clinton does not help the encryption awareness/freedom campaign.
Encryption is NOT just "mathematics, period". It's mathematics, plus operations, password management, key distribution, keeping track of who's allowed to see what, plus hardware and operating systems to run the mathematics on, and unless you're running it in wetware, it's also computer security to protect the hardware and operating systems. And it's black operations to go out and steal the other guys' hardware and keys and yellow-sticky-notes and crack their OSs. In some contexts, especially real people's contexts, your PC may be a fine place to run the encryption, but in an NSA / DoD context, especially when there's a war on, the safest way to manage many of these things is to use dedicated tamper-resistant hardware with the users on one side and the communication network on the other, where you don't have to worry about the user virusing their PC or using their girlfriend's name as the new password every other week, because it's in a black box that just works (or just works if you have the right key token and the right PIN.) EMP hardening has the pleasant side effect that it generally provides TEMPEST quieting/shielding as well. Also, in military environments, using special hardware instead of crypto software running on vanilla PCs is that rampant theft _is_ a problem, but that supply sergeant who'd be happy to requisition that PC for use in more remunerative environments isn't going to steal and sell the crypto bump-in-the-wire box; it's bad enough to lose any classified or sensitive information that was on the PC without also losing the encryption/signature keys. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639