Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning

Perry E. Metzger perry at imsi.com
Mon Jun 6 04:58:04 PDT 1994



Hal says:
> It's not clear to me whether the same restrictions apply to the use of
> the Tessera plug-in card.

Well, they are planning on selling the things to all comers as an
encryption standard for all sorts of applications, so there are limits
on how restrictive they can be.

> It sounds, from what was posted here, like
> Blaze was able to feed sample LEAF's at his card until it accepted one.
> Is that correct? 

Yes.

> If so, apparently users of such cards have access to
> low-level functions which would allow this kind of trick to be used.

Yes.

> Unless there is some way to get a supply of Clipper chips to allow you
> to make Clipper-compatible phones which still protect privacy, then
> all this theorizing is not too useful.

Clipper, Capstone, Tessera, etc, are, to my knowledge, interoperable
implementations of the EES.

Perry






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