Re: Federal Key Registration Agency
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Wed, 19 Jun 1996, Igor Chudov wondered:
Lucky Green wrote: At 16:27 6/18/96, TM Peters wrote:
Speaking to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, Reno said her plan would require people to register with the new agency the secret codes -- or "keys" -- they use to encrypt messages online.
: The cat is out of the bag. Janet Reno is calling for mandatory Government : Access to Keys. Not that her statement would surprise anyone on this list. : Still, I believe the administration has never before publicly stated that : people will be _required_ to deposit their encryption keys with the : government. I wonder what the penalties for failure to comply with this : requirement will be.
A couple of questions [admittedly, I am not the best expect in American politics]:
1) Is there anything real that individual citizens can do?
Keep your PGP262.zip disks in ziplock bags and cache them in the backyard, forests,The golf courses. Get a GPS location and escrow the locations with with trusted friends using Secret Share. Payout to Jim Bell's AP service. Move to Canada? William Knowles erehwon@c2.org Finger for public key -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMcke1AURbnwsNLz5AQHmMQQA2TFznKaMSM9uayXkvpcq/SsYg1hLnNKW 4v+NKSAVoDSGyn96VPxH1zEDP+dHk2MS173ocIUcaCm3VzRbBp6qnukAzTjGxjns PVFFS5dsicx+wR4LFxWhUy/7fjvP6BUTLUwPvQGuXZyh8jof1uuL8FYXPtku6tSG a78TvfAgknU= =IZFJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Thu, 20 Jun 1996, William Knowles wrote:
Keep your PGP262.zip disks in ziplock bags and cache them in the backyard, forests,The golf courses. Get a GPS location and escrow the locations with with trusted friends using Secret Share. Payout to Jim Bell's AP service. Move to Canada?
As was recently demonstrated by the passage of a "designer drug law" whose main purpose was to increase jail time for pot, which nobody in Canada had asked for and was widely opposed, when the US wants Canada to pass a law, Canada passes that law. If Washington gives us GAK, it's little brother Ottawa won't be too far behind.
I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption? [This message may have been dictated with Dragon Dictate 2.01. Please be alert for unintentional word substitutions.] A. Michael Froomkin | +1 (305) 284-4285; +1 (305) 284-6506 (fax) Associate Professor of Law | U. Miami School of Law | froomkin@law.miami.edu P.O. Box 248087 | http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin Coral Gables, FL 33124 USA | It's hot here. And humid.
Michael Froomkin writes:
I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption?
Known plaintext isn't needed for any brute force DES attack. Indeed, our own Dave Wagner showed in a paper not that long ago how to automate the process of detecting a good key. The numbers in the Blaze et al paper are very realistic on this. A year is total bull -- not even within several orders of magnitude of accuracy. Perry
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Froomkin writes:
I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption?
Known plaintext isn't needed for any brute force DES attack. Indeed, our own Dave Wagner showed in a paper not that long ago how to automate the process of detecting a good key.
The numbers in the Blaze et al paper are very realistic on this. A year is total bull -- not even within several orders of magnitude of accuracy.
Further, known plaintext is actually a very reasonable assumption. In S/MIME, for example, the first 8-byte block of text is almost certain to be 43 6f 6e 74 65 6e 74 2d, (i.e. the string "Content-"). This makes the process of analyzing the results trivial. Raph
At 21:20 -0400 6/20/96, Michael Froomkin wrote:
[...] AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption?
If the plaintext is ASCII text, the time is the same but the machine is a little more expensive. What you do is process 8 or more blocks of ciphertext in parallel, matching the high order bit of each byte to 0. With 8 blocks, you get 64 high order bits -- more than the number of key bits -- so you're not likely to guess wrong. If the signal is audio instead of text, I don't know what you look for. That depends on the compression algorithm. If the signal is compressed text, again I would need to see the comressor output. If all you have is one or two blocks of text (e.g., a bank transaction) you decrypt and decide whether the result is just impossible. If it's possible (and there will be many) you send the trial key on to a second processor (a more general one) to try that key on the whole message to decide if the message is still possible. If that processor likes a given key, you send the result to a human -- who chooses among all the possibles. In other words, this doesn't have to be one-step-to-success. All you're doing is pruning the keyspace to something more manageable. - Carl +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2| | "Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song." | +-------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison (aka Mother) -+
participants (6)
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Carl Ellison -
Michael Froomkin -
Perry E. Metzger -
Raph Levien -
s1113645＠tesla.cc.uottawa.ca -
William Knowles