A non-political issue

Adam Shostack adam at homeport.org
Tue Oct 29 19:43:20 PST 2002


On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 01:34:12AM +0100, Anonymous via the Cypherpunks Tonga Remailer wrote:
| (possible duplicate message)
| 
| What technology is available to create a 2048-bit RSA key pair so that:
| 
| 1 - the randomness comes from quantum noise
| 
| 2 - no one knows the secret part,
| 
| 3 - The secret part is kept in the "box" and it is safe as long as the box is physically secured (expense of securing the box is a don't care).
| 
| 4 - "box" can do high-speed signing (say, 0.1 mS per signature) over some kind of network interface
| 
| 5 - you can reasonably convince certain people (that stand to lose a lot and have huge resources) in 1, 2, 3 and 4.
| 
| 6 - The operation budget is around $1m (maintenance not included).
| 
| 7 - attacker's budget is around $100m
| 
| 8 - the key must never be destroyed, so backup is essential.
| 
| In other words, convincing translation of a crypto problem into physical security problem.
| 
| 
| It looks like the key gets created on the same box(es) on which it
| is stored, which all interested parties inspected to any desireable
| level. Once everyone is comfortable the button gets pressed to
| create/distribute the key, and then you put goons with AKs around the
| boxes and pray that no one fucked with the microprocessor ... this may
| mean buying the components at random.  

Look at NCipher, and host in the Bunker.  

Adam




-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume





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