thad@pdi.com (Thaddeus Beier)

DEADBEAT sez

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and importance of Blaze's result for what it is: minuscule. [with which thad disagrees:] Blaze's result destroys the current justification...

Both exaggerate, me thinks. 1) Dr. Blaze blasts out of the water any justification for faith in the competence/honesty of the NSA in this matter. This is a real basic, easy to explain to the corner barber, case of the NSA being caught with its pants down. It was a serious technical flub for them to leave something "this easy"* in the PCMCIA version of Clipper. * "this easy" is compared to the billions-and-billions of years good crypto systems are supposed to hold up, it is not a dig on Dr. Blaze who knows one hell of a lot more about this than do I. 2) We might be net-geeks, but Normal People--even crooks--still use the phone. It is not at all clear to me that the Blaze LEAF Spoof (BLS?) is something which will easily retrofit to a Clipper *phone*. First, is it theoretically possible to do his spoof in the key exchange of a telephone call? Second, is it possible to do it quickly enough that the other phone doesn't get suspicious--i.e., time out? Third, is the needed spoofing hardware something tiny which I will be able to find a Circuit City for $30, which I can trivially plug into my phone as I walk out the door? If not, the practical result is that nearly no one will foil the phone tapping. -kb, the mild-mannered Kent who just realized that: "Now I *am* in the NSA's files. Even the NSA on a stupid isn't dumb enough to not archive this list." P.S. Seeing as how the NSA already has cypherpunks archived, maybe we could talk them into letting us have access to their files--not everything, just the stuff we wrote. FoIA request maybe? -- Kent Borg +1 (617) 776-6899 kentborg@world.std.com kentborg@aol.com Proud to claim 28:15 hours of TV viewing so far in 1994!