NIST Hat Tricks

[John Young]

Pat,


A response to the quote below from your NIST Key Escrow web 
site:


I got the full Discussion Paper #4 with all ten criteria from 
the main desk, along with others that seemed to be appearing as 
the day passed. (I'll fax a copies of any of the handouts to 
anyone wanting hardcopy. We scanned all handouts.)


In breakout session B-2, we were also given only that part of 
Paper #4 that dealt with our session's criteria 3, 4 and 9. It 
was passed out at the end of the meeting after discussion had 
ceased. We did not get a chance to discuss the "example 
potential solutions."


Strange procedure: it seemed as if NIST was sleight-of-handing 
prepared backup papers as if they anticipated resistance. Maybe 
there would have been more concessions or more rabbits pulled 
from the KE hat if there had been even louder "brrrrat-GAK."


Never too late to ask for those other trapped bunnies.


----------

[Excerpt from Pat's web site]:

     * During the first breakout session, in the technical 
discussion of
       criteria # 5 and #6, an authorless (presumably 
government issued)
       "Example Potential Solutions" paper was distributed. It 
caused a
       lot of grumbling amongst the attendees, as they were 
supposed to
       discuss it, without any prior chance to read or react to 
it. Here
       are two versions of it, First, Anonymous Sample 
Solutions (HTML by
       PDF) and a simple ASCII version Sample Solutions (ASCII 
text by
       John Young)
       
       I have not seen an electronic version of the paper that 
I
       received. It contains the following paragraph:
       
       "Example Solutions to export criteria 5 and 6 are 
indentified
       below to help give a better feel for approaches that 
implementors
       may take to satisfy the criteria. The information in 
this paper is
       not intended to represent fail-sfe, cookie cutter 
solutions to the
       criteria, but only to generate more detailed 
discussions."
       
       It is also interesting to note that John Young has an 
electronic
       document with all of the sample solutions (a solution 
for each of
       the ten criteria. I never saw a paper document with all 
ten
       solutions. The one that was handed to me had only two 
criteria, #5
       and #6. I talked to attendees of other breakouts, and 
they had
       received nothing.