The Lotus Position

Kevin L Prigge Kevin.L.Prigge-2 at cis.umn.edu
Mon Jan 22 13:05:15 PST 1996


Herb Sutter said:
> In answer to a question from the floor, Ozzie did say that yes, the
> agreement reached with the NSA was scalable -- IOW, that you could use
> 128-bit keys and give the government 88 of them, instead of 64-and-give-24
> -- but in retrospect I wonder whether keeping Notes at 64 bits was a
> condition of the NSA deal.  I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist, but
> considering that Ray was clearly aware that the 64-bitness was going to
> raise eyebrows and still somehow didn't get around to simply strengthening
> it...  well, it makes you wonder.

Not really. I think the governments position has been 64 bits with
escrow. I doubt that they'd actually ship a 128 bit version with
88 bits escrowed, as I believe the government has stated in the
past that they don't want to give away the store even with escrow.

-- 
Kevin L. Prigge         |"Have you ever gotten tired of hearing those 
UofM Central Computing  | ridiculous AT&T commercials claiming credit 
email: klp at tc.umn.edu   | for things that don't even exist yet? 
010010011101011001100010| You will." -Emmanuel Goldstein 





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list