Re: The Family Key

[peb@PROCASE.COM]

>From: Harry Shapiro <habs@Panix.Com>

>press release claims that the Clipper
>chip doesn't provide anything more than what Law Enforcement already
>has. That is not true.

I was about to say this myself too, but Hellman already pointed it out.
However, it is worth mentioning for emphasis.

The Family key is known not only to the NSA, but to the FBI with their
black box units.  No special protection is given to this key and it
allows the equivalent of Caller-ID *and* Callee-ID over all transmissions
using Clipper regardless of how the calls are routed.  This is *much*
cheaper than speaker recognition used in roving wiretaps!  Roving wire
taps are given out sparingly, but it seems that Clipper would make the 
scanning of huge numbers of calls and saving traffic info the normal
mode of operation.

In my letter to Casa Blanca I mentioned that I noticed this deception 
in the NIST press release.

Another feature of the F key is that it could be changed in new runs of
chip making, but evidently, protecting F is not a great concern by
NIST/FBI, et al. The 3, 34 bit pads, if/when the entire system is
entirely compromised, could be changed--in fact they could do it regularly
anyway--they can keep a list of Serial number to pad mappings.  This
would prevent the system from entirely being compromised by an outside
[NSA] entity, so it is somewhat robust to that possibility.


Paul E. Baclace
peb@procase.com