MEETING SUMMARY: 4-24-93 Cypherpunks Meeting

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Several people have asked for summaries (or minutes) for our physical
Cypherpunks meetings, especially for our "Emergency Ad Hoc Meeting" a few
days ago.

Some Reasons NOT to do Minutes:

* it formalizes a fundamentally informal meeting (recall that Cypherpunks
have no legal status, no structure, no voting procedures, no officers,
etc.).

* some folks may be leery of having their names appear.

* the credit assignment problem: as soon as summaries are written, people
begin to complain that someone else got the credit for their idea, that
their views weren't mentioned in the summary, and so forth. 

* somebody has to take the notes needed to generate the summary.


Some Reasons IN FAVOR of Minutes:

* with 40 people at our last meeting (counting the audio conference call,
via Internet, to Boston and Washington, D.C.), with more than 400 on our
mailing list, and with the Wiretap Chip events, these are historic times.
(Fortunately, the list itself is a valuable archive of our history. Let's
hope good archives are being kept by someone!)

* folks who cannot attend physical meetings may still want to know what's
basically going on. (And perhaps other groups will nucleate and grow.)

* even folks who were at the meeting may want a summary, to keep their
memories refreshed.


So, some pros and cons to writing up a summary. What I plan to do here is
to just write up a very brief snapshot summary, oriented more toward
informing the non-attendees than to reminding the attendees of action items
or things they agreed to do.

Anyone with additions to make is of course encouraged to do so. Using the
"MEETING SUMMARY:" prefix might be useful.


1. The Meeting Itself.

Saturday, 24 April 1993, 12 noon to past 6 p.m. (when I had to leave).
Offices of Cygnus Support, in Mountain View. Approximately 25-30 in
attendance, including several new faces.

John Gilmore was selling issues of "Wired" at cost. 

An amazing conference call was made to sites in Northern Virginia (Bob
Stafford, Paul Ferguson, others) and to Boston (Marc Horowitz, Derek
Atkins, others). What was amazing was that the audio went through the
Internet and was DES-encrypted (for a while at least, until complaints by
one of the sites about the audio quality caused us to turn off the
encryption). Still, seeing an encrypted Internet conference call was
something...a small step toward the world of Vinge's "True Names."

Jim Bidzos, President of RSA Data Security, intended to just speak briefly
about the Clipper Chip, Capstone, and the view of RSA, but ended up staying
and participating for several hours. Mike Godwin, of EFF, was present at
the Boston (I think) site. Glenn Tenney, organizers of the Hackers
Conference and general activist, was also present for the first time. The
other usual folks were there, including many active in cryptography and
data security. (My apologies for not mentioning any other luminaries here.)

All in all, a stimulating meeting.


2. The Theme: The Clipper Chip.

This of course dominated the discussion all day, and was the explicit
reason for the emergency meeting. There's too much to cover here in detail.

Jim Bidzos and Arthur Abraham both presented information on the Clipper
Chip, including a long data sheet from Mykrotronx (sent to Arthur) on their
Myk-78 chip. (Copies distributed, and also faxed to the remote sites.)
There was some debate about who Mykotronx was and whether it was really
independent from the NSA.

Capstone, the follow-on program, is a superset of Clipper and contains the
DSS signature standard (which RSA Data led the fight against...and most of
thought it was a dead issue--then it appeared here!). No public key methods
are known to be incorporated, thought they may be. (Lots of analysis and
question-asking still to be done.)

Reverse-engineering was also discussed. VLSI Technology, the chip company,
is a partner with Mykrotronx and apparently has a tamper-resistant chip
technology. 


3. What Motivated the Clipper Chip?

It appears the Clipper/Capstone program is initially intended to "buy
market share" as quickly as possible, with government offices requiring
Clipperphones (and probably for those they do business with). Perhaps the
intent is undercut competing models and make Clipper the de facto standard,
which can then be made the de jure standard.

Some think the key escrow features were added _late_ in the proposal and
may even be _expected_ to fail (fail in the sense of key escrow agencies
never getting rolling, issues never getting resolved, etc.). This fits with
the idea of built-in backdoor to the enciphered traffic. The Agency may be
more interested in quickly proliferating a breakable "standard" for voice
encryption than in implementing the key escrow idea. (Left unanswered in
this speculation is how court-ordered wiretaps would then be
executed...would the FBI and NSA simply acknowledge the weakness? I don't
think so.)

The secrecy of the Clipper/Capstone project was quite impressive. Bidzos
confirmed again, and convincingly, that he knew *nothing* of this whole
effort until the announcement (or possibly the night before, when a
reporter called him?). Apparently John Markoff, who sometimes reads this
list and can comment if he wishes, had figured out some aspects or had been
told them by a source, and was preparing an article for the "NY Times."
This may've prompted the announcement timing.

Several people commented that several previously-puzzling events become
clearer in retrospect, such as the then-unknown Mykrotronx sniffing around
to get an RSA license (which they don't yet have).

I can't recap all the discussion, much of which was similar to what's been
going on in sci.crypt and elsewhere. Everyone agreed that this was a
seminal event, that the Clipper/Capstone announcement is a crucial event.
 

3. Lobbying Against the Clipper Chip

The profound consequences call for major efforts.

We discussed boycotting products, spreading negative reports, and  reverse
engineering the algorithm and publishing it so software solutions can
spoof/imitate _part_ of the system (i.e., so someone with a SoundBlaster
board or other system can talk to someone with one of these Clipperphones
without escrowing keys or being wiretappable)

John Gilmore has already posted to the list the results of our
brainstorming session to come up with questions to ask the FBI, NIST, NSA,
Congress, and the Administration. Mike Godwin argued that a lot of
embarrassing questions could quickly derail the plan. Others confirmed that
the NSA mathematicians seemed to be put on the spot by the many questions.
That is, it's conceivable this plan could begin to unravel fairly soon. 


4. Educating the Public.

The Boston group took this as their focus of the rest of the meeting (we
went offline after about an hour or so on the conference call). I haven't
heard the results.


5. Lobbying the Legislature and Officials.

Similarly, the D.C. group took this as their area of involvement. No
feedback yet.


6. What Happens if Clipper Flops?

An interesting discussion out in the lobby (and I probably missed many such
interesting discussions!) had to do with scenarios for how Clipper may
fail. Whit Diffie described how the failure could either so greatly
embarrass the Administration that they'd be loathe to try it again (the
Viet Nam Syndrome, applied to crypto) or that it could provoke them to
tighten restrictions even further, perhaps even to the point of an outright
ban on the use of unapproved encryption at *any* level. (Issues of
enforceability, detectability, Constitutional issues, etc., of course exist
and will be points of attack on any such comprehensive ban.)

(The question of whether Clipper and Capstone applies, either now or later,
to *data* came up several times. The Capstone chip is rated at "10-16
Mbps," which implies it is targeted for Ethernet-type speeds, and hence
data. There was general agreement by all I heard that the Clipper/Capstone
program is indeed intended to target more than just voice encryption and
that our fears about restrictions on strong crypto are justified.)


7. Other Miscellaneous Topics

* Since Jim Bidzos was there, the topic of PGP naturally came up several
times. Eric Hughes let this run for a while, then moved the discussion back
to Clipper. Jim Bidzos clearly had some strong opinions, but also did not
want this to be the forum for debating patents and the legality and ethics
of PGP. He did acknowledge, in my opinion, the point that RSA Data Security
had somewhat neglected the individual end-user (in products such as
MailSafe, which hasn't changed since 1988), in favor of the many large
deals with Lotus, Microsoft, Apple, etc., to get RSA installed in their
e-mail software. He acknowledged that in some sense this left an ecological
niche for a product like PGP to fill, though he insisted that such a
product could be legally developed and distributed if it used the "RSAREF"
package and wasn't sold commercially. (There are lots of threads and
keywords here: RSAREF, RIPEM, TIPEM, B-SAFE, Apple's OCE, etc.)

(Some of us continue to hope some accommodation can be reached between RSA
Data and the PGP community. The upcoming battle over strong crypto is a
bigger issue than this squabble. I remain convinced that RSA Data Security
is "on our side" in this fight for continued access to strong crypto. In
fact, in my opinion, the Clipper/Capstone program looks to be a complete
end-run around RSA and public key techniques, a thinly disguised attempt to
seize control of the crypto market from RSA. In this battle, RSA may be
fighting for their economic survival!)

* The issue of the name of our group, the Cypherpunks name, was not
discussed. The U.K. group has apparently picked "U.K. Cryptoprivacy Group"
as their name.

* The normal schedule for meetings will continue, with the next regular
Cypherpunks (Bay Area) meeting on Saturday, 8 May.


Well, this is my summary. Feedback is welcome. While I don't want to take
meticulous notes the way a "Recording Secretary" is supposed to, I don't
mind writing up these kinds of snapshot summaries.

May you live in interesting times, indeed!

-Tim May



--
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, smashing of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: MailSafe and PGP available.
Waco Massacre + Big Brother Wiretap Chip = A Nazi Regime