Re: Government-Controlled Trust Hierarchies

[paul@poboy.b17c.ingr.com (Paul Robichaux)]

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> By the way, just so everyone knows, I understand (based on a
> conversation with Steve Kent, who should be a reliable source for
> this) that Microsoft is one of the suppliers to the upcoming DMS, or
> defense messaging system. The DMS will be using Tessera -- it means
> that Microsoft and several other firms are going to be the largest
> purveyors of escrowed software in the world.

Well, no, not actually; at least that's not the explanation that the
various trade rags have been giving.

DMS is an infrastructure for passing messages around. The actual
Tessera hardware does the escrowed encryption and so on. All the
software has to do is know how to talk to the Tessera PCMCIA card.
One of the key features of DMS is that it uses as much
commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software as possible. 

To support Tessera, that COTS must either a) be purpose-built (like
LJL/SESI's ArmorMail) to use Tessera, or b) have new versions planned
for the future (Lotus Notes? MS Mail?)

It's interesting to note that the APIs needed to talk to a Tessera
card and National Semi's RSA-only card are very close to one another.
It would be IMHO not too hard to patch, say, MS Mail (especially with
the availability of MAPI!) to use alternate types of tokens.

- -Paul

- -- 
Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG      | "Information is the currency of democracy."
perobich@ingr.com           |     - some old guy named Thomas Jefferson
	       Of course I don't speak for Intergraph.
	       

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