NSA/NIST Security Lab

Peter Trei trei at process.com
Wed Sep 3 06:52:59 PDT 1997



Uran233 at aol.com wrote:

> Yes but the NSA really wanted the Skipjack for DOD messsages. 

As I recall, only for sensitive but unclassified data.

>They (probably) monitor all of those anyway. 

Tessera/Clipper had built-in GAK, so a backdoor would have been 
redundant. 

> But Matt did alot of work on his project but did
> he show how to brak Skipjack and does this totally trash the Fortezza
> program?

No. He showed that with a bit of work he could fake the ID of the 
chip sending the message. He did not 'break Skipjack' in any way.
He did show that the protocol (which used Skipjack for bulk 
encryption) was incompetently designed.

Get a spellchecker.

Peter Trei
trei at process.com







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