Jim Gillogly <jim@mentat.com> writes:

Eric Cordian says:

...

Could someone poke through Lotus Notes with a debugger and see exactly how this "giving 24 bits to the government" is implemented?

Lotus produced a "backgrounder" called "Differential Workfactor Cryptography" when they first promulgated the 64/40 stuff. It says (in part):

We do that by encrypting 24 of the 64 bits under a public RSA key provided by the U.S. government and binding the encrypted partial key to the encrypted data.

I haven't seen the USG RSA key -- if it's 512 bits, that would be a humorous next factoring target.

It would be humorous to even have the modulus and exponent -- if someone can obtain them, I'll package it up as a working PGP key, and give it user id of Spook GAK key <dirnsa@nsa.gov>, and submit to the keyservers. Then we have solved the key escrow implementation problems for the US government -- anyone who wants to send them a message can simply add DIRNSA to the list of recipeints. I don't have a copy of Notes, otherwise I thought this a most fun exploit to attempt. The above "solution" to key escrow infra-structure calls from Freeh etc., should be credited to Carl Ellison; probably others have proposed it also. Carl offered to sign some cheif spooks key, if he would generate one for the purpose, cheif spook declined the offer. I observed a few times before that now that Lotus have organised with the NSA to produce such a key, we can do the job of implementing the voluntary key escrow infrastructure for them. (It is voluntary right?) Adam -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`