I attended the opening session of the National Computer Security Conference this morning. Actually it's been renamed to "Info systems something-or-other", but I don't recall what. The opening session is NIST's opportunity to take center stage, which they did. The most interesting information to come out of the session was that the govt is still pushing very hard for key escrow. Most of the speakers mentioned key escrow, and talked about the need for business and govt to compromise to meet the needs of law enforcement blah blah blah. The "distinguished awardee" is Dennis Branstad, his speech was read by Steven Walker. In it, Branstad claimed that key escrow is a great gift being provided by the government to the private sector, and that companies want it a lot. Stuart Katzke from NIST said that "our" goal (where "our" is computer security professionals) is to deploy secure systems, but he believes that "we" often lose sight of that goal. Said that govt and industry need to find compromises so that both can meet their goals and get systems deployed. I belive he mentioned export laws and key escrow as areas for potential "compromises", but am not certain; if not stated it was implied. My interpretation is that he claims those who object to key escrow are getting in the way of deploying secure systems. Someone, I don't recall who, pointed to the european "interest" in key escrow, saying other govts might not allow systems to be deployed without key escrow, thus key escrow was a good thing. Mike