News Flash: Clipper Bug?
Duncan Frissell
frissell at panix.com
Thu Jun 2 06:09:52 PDT 1994
On Thu, 2 Jun 1994, Peter Wayner wrote:
>
>
> Please explain how to forge the LEAFs. I presume that this doesn't
> involve super-encryption.
>
Here is what the article on the upper right hand side of this morning's
New York Times says:
"To defeat the system, Dr. Blaze programmed a 'rouge' unit to test
thousands of LEAF's. Once he found a valid key, he inserted it in place
of the one that would be generated by the Clipper device. Later, if law
enforcement officials attempted to use it for decoding, it would not
unlock this particular message."
He was able to find LEAF's that passed checksum in spite of having an
invalid session-key number.
If generating these things takes a lot of computing power, maybe we could
come up with a distributed processing project like RSA 129 was cracked by.
DCF
More information about the Testlist
mailing list