chaffing and winnowing

[Bill Stewart]

At 07:40 PM 04/15/2001 -0400, Faustine wrote:
>Does anyone know of any serious work being done on developing the concepts of
>winnowing and chaffing, as outlined in Ronald L. Rivest's 1998
>paper 'Confidentiality without Encryption'?

Other than the initial flurry of activity around the announcement,
there isn't much in chaffing and winnowing that's
really useful in most real-world environments
that would encourage development of new variations.

The fundamental point was that if *any* kind of digital signature
system is permitted, it can be used to implement encryption,
so bans on encryption technology are inherently bogus.
That doesn't mean that various governments won't try it,
or won't make laws requiring users of digital signature systems
to give up their signature keys when ordered by a court
or sometimes by police, but it doesn't really affect the
forced disclosure of encryption keys problem.