CDR: Re: Zero Knowledge changes business model (press release)

[Greg Broiles]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 04:20:31PM -0500, Eric Murray wrote:
> One can envision a system where there's a corporate "document czar" who
> is regularly given docs from various employees and who then encrypts them
> in his own key.  When and where the docs get decrypted is determined by
> corporate policies.  No key escrow required.
> 
> I don't know of any existing system like this, but formal corporate
> document control isn't my field.

I'm aware of one example of a similar use in a NASDAQ-listed FDA-regulated
pharmaceutical company, where they have a staff of "document czars" who
are the only ones empowered to produce, edit, and maintain archives of
documents considered especially critical to their intellectual property
and/or research and production records required to gain and keep FDA
listing for their products. I get the impression that's standard practice
in the industry; and probably standard practice anywhere, where the
continued availability (or confidentiality) of documents can turn into
gains or losses in the $100M - $10B range. 

See, for example, David Mamet's "The Spanish Prisoner". 

In any event, I think things work much better when crypto people can
present a toolbox of primitive operations to ordinary businesses,
and let the ordinary businesses identify which of the primitives would
solve actual, existing problems - cute crypto parlor tricks going
searching for real-world utility don't seem to meet an especially
warm reception. (And I'm saying that as a person guilty of promoting
the latter, though the futility of that behavior becomes clearer in
hindsight.) 

--
Greg Broiles gbroiles at netbox.com
PO Box 897
Oakland CA 94604