Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   The New York Times, March 22, 1998, p. 31.

   New Method To Veil Data Could Upstage Export Policy 

      Cryptologists find a way to foil eavesdroppers without
      secret codes.

   By John Markoff

   San Francisco, March 21 -- One of the nation's leading
   computer scientists has proposed a novel technique for
   scrambling data that could circumvent Government export
   policies aimed at limiting the foreign sale of encryption
   technology.

   The technique, which was described this week in an Internet
   discussion among computer researchers, was introduced by
   Ronald L. Rivest, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts
   Institute of Technology and one of the inventors of the
   most widely used commercial encryption scheme, RSA.

   The new approach, which is described in a short technical
   paper that has been posted to Mr. Rivest's M.I.T. Web site
   (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt), is
   described as "chaffing and winnowing" digital information
   instead of encrypting it.

   According to Mr. Rivest's paper, it is possible to hide a
   message by breaking it into packets that are then secretly
   identified as good information, or "wheat," and gibberish,
   or "chaff," in such a way that an eavesdropper cannot
   distinguish the two.

   Because the individual packets would not be encrypted, Mr.
   Rivest said, such a system would circumvent current export
   restrictions.

   The two principal ways of communicating in secret are
   encryption and steganography. Steganography uses computer
   techniques to embed a secret message in a document like a
   digital image. In encryption, secret information is encoded
   using functions that require difficult mathematical tasks
   to decode, and it has become the standard way of
   transmitting secret information electronically.

   There are no restrictions on the domestic use of this
   technology, but the Government has been trying to force the
   industry to adopt standards that would permit
   law-enforcement officials to have mathematical keys
   allowing them to decode messages without the knowledge of
   the sender or receiver. The Clinton Administration says the
   standards are needed to fight crime and terrorism.
   Opponents argue that the Government decoding keys, to be
   stored in computers, could easily be stolen, compromising
   privacy and the security of credit card numbers and other
   personal information.

   In terms of exports, with few exceptions the Government
   limits the software to codes that can be easily broken.

   "Winnowing does not employ encryption, and so does not have
   a 'decryption key,' " Mr. Rivest wrote in his paper. "As
   usual, the policy debate about regulating technology ends
   up being obsoleted by technological innovations."

   Peter Neumann, an SRI International computer scientist who
   has read Mr. Rivest's paper, said that although "there is
   still no certainty that this is a practical idea," if it
   works, "it throws another clinker at the Justice
   Department."

   Other cryptography experts said they were uncertain whether
   it would be possible to skirt Government export
   restrictions in this way, but that the idea was an
   impressive new approach that might have valuable commercial
   applications.

   "He's a very clever guy," said George Spix, a Microsoft
   researcher who specializes in cryptography policy issues.
   " It goes to show that for all the technological wizardry
   in the world, there's nothing like an intellect."

   One of the potential limitations of the new method is that
   the total information transmitted might need to be hundreds
   of times larger than the actual message.

   Mr. Rivest said, however, that he had discussed the idea
   with Adi Shamir, an Israeli cryptographer, and that Mr.
   Shamir had proposed compression methods that would reduce
   the total transmission to only about twice the actual
   message size.

   The strength of the idea for chaffing and winnowing is that

   it is possible to prove mathematically that a message
   cannot be decoded, Mr. Rivest said.

   He said he had come up with the idea recently while
   teaching an undergraduate computer course.

   In addition to his role as associate director of the
   Laboratory of Computer Science at M.I.T., Mr. Rivest is a
   consultant and shareholder in RSA Data Security Inc., a
   company that develops encryption software.

   "I put the winnowing and chaffing idea out there to
   stimulate debate,"' Mr. Rivest said. "I hope it will help
   clear up some of the issues that have been raised in the
   policy discussion.
             
   [End]