deadbeat wrote: | On the one hand, I applaud Dr. Blaze for the discoveries based on his | black-box analysis of the NSA product. How fortunate to have him | working in a laboratory seeded with this gear. | | On the other hand, I am amused at the "big deal" being made about such | a minor result. This "protocol failure" exposes the NSA product to no | new threats. If one's objective is to use SKIPJACK but to defeat key | escrow, pre-encryption is easier, conceptually simpler, and may be more | secure, depending on what is actually inside the SKIPJACK code. Actually, Blaze's work does nullify one important aspect of Clipper that pre-encryption does not address, and that is traffic analasis. Adam -- Adam Shostack adam@bwh.harvard.edu Politics. From the greek "poly," meaning many, and ticks, a small, annoying bloodsucker.