Silver Linings and Monkey Wrenches

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 1:13 AM 1/31/96, Futplex wrote:
>Bill Frantz writes:
>> One other small advantage I can see to using Lotus's crippled encryption.
>> It disguises the fact that a message is actually (double) encrypted with
>> PGP.  Attackers have to break the 40 bits before they see the PGP encrypted
>> data.
>
>I don't understand. Are you saying that there's a special benefit to doing
>superencryption (GAK encryption over non-GAK encryption) when the GAK layer
>is Lotus Notes ?

Maybe what Bill was getting at is that a widely-deployed system of "fairly
good" crypto (a la Clipper/Tessera) could have a silver lining. As many,
many of us have noted for the past several years, if the authorities have
to first jump through hoops (ostensibly), getting court orders, obtaining
the LEAF/LEEF, etc., and only then do they determine that some kind of
superencryption has been added, then this could make things worse for them
than before.

There are of course wrinkles:

-- superencryption could be banned

-- enforcement is problematic, and if there is only a tiny chance of
catching that Fifth Horseman (the Superencryptor), then the penalties would
have to be astronomically high, to satisfy the Basic Equation: (risk of
getting caught) x (penalty if caught) > (payoff of the crime)

-- interoperability. Hard to block it if done in text mode, PGP-style, but
Lotus Notes will presumably be designed to make superencryption harder to
do.

And of course we can never cheer on a mandatory crypto scheme, for a
variety of reasons. I'm just saying that we can look for silver linings, a
way to make lemonade out of lemons.

It may even be possible to nuke these NSA-enabled programs by publicizing
ways of monkeywrenching them, as with superencryption.


--Tim


Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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