I doubt this is true. The report doesn't mention IBM's KR system, and is so bland as to be innocuous. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd be interested in learning more. -Declan On 14 Jun 1997, Secret Squirrel wrote:

According to a usually reliable contact in a position to know, IBM Friday filed a liable suit against the 11 authors of the study titled "The risks of key recovery, key escrow and trusted third-party encryption" plus their employers and the Centere for Democracy and Technology, which sponsored the report. According to my contact, IBM feels that the report directly targets their own key recovery system, and falsely implies that it isn't reliable. They are asking for unspecified damages.

This means IBM is suing such people as Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, and Ronald Rivest, along with AT&T, Sun, Microsoft, and MIT over the question of whether its key recovery system really works. Considering that truth is a defense and the details of the IBM system could be part of the defense's evidence, it should be an interesting trial to say the least.

I have not seen the actual court papers and really have no idea whether my contact is totally accurate. Can anyone confirm the details? I just read the study in question, and it sounds like IBM is totally out of line and trying to intimidate its critics with threats of expensive if frivolous lawsuits. On the other hand, some of the parties named in the suit (Microsoft, AT&T) have their own armies of lawyers to defend themselves, so it's hard to be sure of what's going on here.

I think the report is still at www.crypto.com or www.cdt.org.

On 14 Jun 1997, Secret Squirrel wrote:

This means IBM is suing such people as Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, and Ronald Rivest, along with AT&T, Sun, Microsoft, and MIT over the question of whether its key recovery system really works. Considering that truth is a defense and the details of the IBM system could be part of the defense's evidence, it should be an interesting trial to say the least.

Has anyone asked Matt Blaze and/or any of the others mentioned above if they have heard anything about this? [I would do so myself, but I am away from my address lists, other than the memorized ones.] alano@teleport.com | "Those who are without history are doomed to retype it."