Re: How I Would Ban Strong Crypto in the U.S.

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

Raph Levien <s_levien@research.att.com> writes:
>4. Thus, the best leverage for the TLAs to win is to guide the 
>development of a key management infrastructure with the following 
>property: if you don't register your key, you can't play. I believe that 
>this is the true meaning of the word "voluntary:" you're free to make 
>the choice not to participate.

>5. This is _important_. If you can't get the keys for your 
>correspondents, you can't use encryption. If they build a key management 
>infrastructure that actually works, people will use it.

There has been some discussion at the last couple of crypto conferences
about possible ways around this plan.  (I guess the idea goes back at
least a year or two.)

One idea is to register a 2048 bit public key.  You have to give the
secret key to the government in order to use the registry.  But what you
do is to create a second key and embed it in the first.  It is, say, a
1024 bit key which is the lower half of the 2048 bit key.  It has
different secret factors that nobody but you knows.  Then when people
send you messages they encrypt using this modulus rather than the
official one.

You get the benefit of the government-sponsored key certificate
infrastructure, but the government is not able to crack your
communications.

The discussion at the crypto conferences has centered on how to design
key systems which don't have this "subliminal key" property, where it is
impossible to create pairs of keys such that publishing one reveals the
other.  I think they were looking at some of the discrete log systems
since in RSA it is pretty easy to do what I have described above.  You
just create the 1024 bit key first, at random, then choose the 2048 bit
key so its modulus matches the 1024 bit key in its low bits.  This is the
same basic method as the so-called "dead beef" attacks against PGP key
ID's which were published earlier this year.

So it will be interesting to see whether any government sponsored PK
infrastructure takes care to avoid subliminal keys.

Hal