"Newsweek" Article on Clipper and Encryption

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

The following appeared in this week's "Newsweek," June 7, 1993, p. 70. Our
own Eric Hughes is briefly quoted.
 
Any mistakes are the fault of either me or my OCR program.


The Code of the Future

Uncle Sam wants you to use ciphers it can crack

Forget the castle. If only Queen Elizabeth had given Chuck and Di a
thumbnail-size computer chip for their wedding, she would have been spared
reading in the London tabs how her son" wanted to live in [his lover's]
trousers," among other excerpts from taped phone conversations. Instead,
the chip would have converted their words into "hsssssss." No signal
analyzer, no supercomputer, no wiretap could have decoded the white noise.
    
The device that works this reputation-saving magic is called a Data
Encryption Standard (DES) chip, and there's no practical way to crack it.
That's what America's supersecret spymasters, the National Security Agency,
intended when they designed the cryptographic system in the 1970s with IBM.
While that delights industry and privacy advocates, it's come back to haunt
the government: wiretaps are useless against any suspect using a
DES-encrypted phone. So in April the Clinton administration announced it
was backing the NSA in its push to impose a universal encryption standard
to which the Feds alone would hold the keys. The agency argues that's the
only way to ensure it will always be able to decode foreign communications.
Civil libertarians and corporations don't see it that way. Says
computer-security expert Eric Hughes of Berkeley," The government is
saying, 'If you want to lock something up, you have to [give us] the key'."
    
No one doubts that the nation's voice, data, electronic mail and other
communications need locks, and fast. Industrial spies grab fax, e-mail and
other computer and microwave transmissions out of the air. Hackers broke
into Internet, a world-wide computer network, 773 times last year, 90
percent more than in 1991. Hackers also peek into computers that hold
medical records, credit-card purchases, even video rentals. Cellular phones
offer as much privacy as going on "Oprah." The FBI can't keep up with all
the cybercrime. Secret codes can, and since World War, II codes have been
based on algorithms--formulas that transform one set of numbers into
another. NSA's new chip, to be used in a secure phone sold by AT&T,
encrypts computer transmissions and phone conversations with an algorithm
so complex "it would take a CRAY YMP [supercomputer] over a billion years
to solve," says Raymond Kammer of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), which worked with NSA on the algorithm.
    
Yet the principle is simple. A sending phone and a receiving phone
electronically choose one algorithm, out of millions, for their
conversation (diagram). The only way to unscramble the resulting
10001100101s is to obtain the "keys," which will be held by two agencies
chosen by the attorney general. The agencies-this is the part NSA
likes-would give them to officials who have the requisite wiretap warrant.
But industry has a couple of problems with this. First, NSA has yet to
explain how the chip works, so outside verification that it's hackproof
will have to wait. Worse, with millions of NSA chips in use, the agencies
holding the keys would have to store them on computers, which are
vulnerable to recreational hackers, foreign spooks and industrial spies.
    
For now, no one is forced to use the NSA chip. But manufacturers who put a
rival chip into, say, their modems would likely be denied government
contracts, as well asexport licenses for the NSA-proof products. Even that
may not appease the spymasters. "No one rules out a mandatory encryption
standard," says NIST spokesman Mat Heyman. That's industry's greatest fear,
which NIST will attempt to allay in meetings this week. And next week Rep.
Edward Markey holds hearings on whether NSA can keep the keys to its codes
safe from hackers. Or even Fleet Street.

SHARON BEGLEY with MELINDA LIU in Washington and JOSHUA COOPER RAMO