Re: Just say "No" to key recovery concerns...keep OpenPGP pure

[Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>]

On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Tim May wrote:
> (Disaster planning, for "what if Alice gets hit by a
> truck?" scenarios, are of course handled by having Alice lock up her
> private keys in her safe, or perhaps her department manager's safe,
> whatever. This is a dangerous security flaw, if the key is released, but
> has the advantage that it's a fairly conventional recovery approach, and is
> not built into the cryptosystem itself.

Tim,
The system above you are proposing is [C,G]AK, plain and simple. This is
what some companies are doing already. And it is a Bad Thing.

[Sidetrack: which is of course why PGP had to find another solution to
present to those customers already using GAK. IMHO, and I can't help but
be a bit surprised that I find myself in the minority on this
issue, at least as far as the list is concerned. What PGP did was
_elegant_.]

-- Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> PGP encrypted email preferred.
   "Tonga? Where the hell is Tonga? They have Cypherpunks there?"