monkey-wrenching GAK

[Timothy C. May]

At 4:46 PM 9/19/96, Ray Arachelian wrote:

>Another thing you can do: generate huge key pairs all day long and submit
>them to the NSA.  If enough people do this, they will be flooded and
>overworked, of course they may ignore them, etc, or make it hard to do
>so, but if everyone generates a 4K key every hour or two and discards it,
>but gives the key pair to the NSA anyway, they will run out of storage
>space, or at least it will make it much much harder for them to figgure
>out which key you are using for conversation X.

Ah, but what about the _fee_ for registering a key? You really didn't think
this would be free, did you?

(It costs money to register cars, guns, etc., so why would it be "free" to
register a key?)

Besides being a revenue enhancement tool, charging a fee stops this sort of
flooding attack.

(Note: One of my biggest objections to GAK, besides the political/civil
rights issue, is what it does to systems which generate lots and lots of
keys on an ad hoc, continuing basis. GAK, if enforced, puts a major speed
bump in the way and increases costs, possibly making certain kinds of
systems infeasible.)

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay at got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."