Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messa ges.

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:30 AM 08/13/2001 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
>I'm aware of exactly two datapoints - Skipjack (which wasn't good enough
>that anyone wanted to use it), and the recent 'dual counter mode' snafu.
>That's not enough to draw broad conclusions.

Dual Counter was a serious crypto product that was broken and failed.

But Skipjack was apparently strong enough, within the limits of 80-bit keys,
and while the academic whitewash team didn't have time for more than a
cursory examination, that wasn't the real problem with the system.
After all, it came with a guaranteed wiretap capability,
was a clear political scam, and rapidly acquired public hatred and ridicule,
plus the only advantage it had was being stronger than 1-DES,
which was in practice strong enough for almost all non-money-transfer apps.
The whole system reeked badly, but the Skipjack part was the strongest link.