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"I assume everyone knows the little arrangement that lotus reached with the NSA over its encrypted secure email?" I'm new here, so do tell if I am wrong. Are you referring to the two levels of Encryption available in Bogus Notes? More or less, yes. Lotus knew nobody would buy a 40 bit version of their crypto, so there is a two-level encryption all right, but not along

those lines - in the export version, some of the session key is encrypted using a PKI "work reduction factor" key in the message header; this section of header is important, as lotus gateways won't accept messages that have had it disturbed. by decoding this block, the NSA have the actual keysize they need to block reduced to the legal export level of 40 bits; one government found this out *after* rolling it out to all their billing and contract negotiation departments... belgum or sweden by memory . Lotus thought it would be ok if only the NSA (and other US government orgs) could break the key, rather than letting everyone have an equal chance (and indeed, letting their customers know their crypto was still only 40 bit vs USA intel agencies) Still, even the domestic version was only 64 bits, which is painfully small even by the standards of the day. certainly, even "strong" lotus could have been crackable by the NSA, who after all own their own fab plant to make custom VLSI cracking chips.