RE: NSA Threatens To "OUT" Republicans Over Hubbell Investigation

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 08:57 PM 11/9/98 -0800, Matthew James Gering wrote:
>Yes, I assumed as much. But it is electronic circuits that are EMP/nuclear
>hardened, not the "encryption technology."  ......
>, encryption is mathematics, period. National
>security fearmongering to spite Clinton does not help the encryption
>awareness/freedom campaign.

Encryption is NOT just "mathematics, period".  It's mathematics,
plus operations, password management, key distribution,
keeping track of who's allowed to see what, 
plus hardware and operating systems to run the mathematics on,
and unless you're running it in wetware, it's also
computer security to protect the hardware and operating systems.
And it's black operations to go out and steal the other guys'
hardware and keys and yellow-sticky-notes and crack their OSs.

In some contexts, especially real people's contexts,
your PC may be a fine place to run the encryption,
but in an NSA / DoD context, especially when there's a war on,
the safest way to manage many of these things is to use
dedicated tamper-resistant hardware with the users on one side
and the communication network on the other, where
you don't have to worry about the user virusing their PC
or using their girlfriend's name as the new password every other week,
because it's in a black box that just works (or just works
if you have the right key token and the right PIN.)

EMP hardening has the pleasant side effect that it generally
provides TEMPEST quieting/shielding as well.

Also, in military environments, using special hardware instead of
crypto software running on vanilla PCs is that rampant theft
_is_ a problem, but that supply sergeant who'd be happy to 
requisition that PC for use in more remunerative environments
isn't going to steal and sell the crypto bump-in-the-wire box;
it's bad enough to lose any classified or sensitive information
that was on the PC without also losing the encryption/signature keys.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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