"Newsweek" Article on Clipper and Encryption

The following appeared in this week's "Newsweek," June 7, 1993, p. 70. Our
own Eric Hughes is briefly quoted.
 
Any mistakes are the fault of either me or my OCR program.


The Code of the Future

Uncle Sam wants you to use ciphers it can crack

Forget the castle. If only Queen Elizabeth had given Chuck and Di a
thumbnail-size computer chip for their wedding, she would have been spared
reading in the London tabs how her son" wanted to live in [his lover's]
trousers," among other excerpts from taped phone conversations. Instead,
the chip would have converted their words into "hsssssss." No signal
analyzer, no supercomputer, no wiretap could have decoded the white noise.
    
The device that works this reputation-saving magic is called a Data
Encryption Standard (DES) chip, and there's no practical way to crack it.
That's what America's supersecret spymasters, the National Security Agency,
intended when they designed the cryptographic system in the 1970s with IBM.
While that delights industry and privacy advocates, it's come back to haunt
the government: wiretaps are useless against any suspect using a
DES-encrypted phone. So in April the Clinton administration announced it
was backing the NSA in its push to impose a universal encryption standard
to which the Feds alone would hold the keys. The agency argues that's the
only way to ensure it will always be able to decode foreign communications.
Civil libertarians and corporations don't see it that way. Says
computer-security expert Eric Hughes of Berkeley," The government is
saying, 'If you want to lock something up, you have to [give us] the key'."
    
No one doubts that the nation's voice, data, electronic mail and other
communications need locks, and fast. Industrial spies grab fax, e-mail and
other computer and microwave transmissions out of the air. Hackers broke
into Internet, a world-wide computer network, 773 times last year, 90
percent more than in 1991. Hackers also peek into computers that hold
medical records, credit-card purchases, even video rentals. Cellular phones
offer as much privacy as going on "Oprah." The FBI can't keep up with all
the cybercrime. Secret codes can, and since World War, II codes have been
based on algorithms--formulas that transform one set of numbers into
another. NSA's new chip, to be used in a secure phone sold by AT&T,
encrypts computer transmissions and phone conversations with an algorithm
so complex "it would take a CRAY YMP [supercomputer] over a billion years
to solve," says Raymond Kammer of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), which worked with NSA on the algorithm.
    
Yet the principle is simple. A sending phone and a receiving phone
electronically choose one algorithm, out of millions, for their
conversation (diagram). The only way to unscramble the resulting
10001100101s is to obtain the "keys," which will be held by two agencies
chosen by the attorney general. The agencies-this is the part NSA
likes-would give them to officials who have the requisite wiretap warrant.
But industry has a couple of problems with this. First, NSA has yet to
explain how the chip works, so outside verification that it's hackproof
will have to wait. Worse, with millions of NSA chips in use, the agencies
holding the keys would have to store them on computers, which are
vulnerable to recreational hackers, foreign spooks and industrial spies.
    
For now, no one is forced to use the NSA chip. But manufacturers who put a
rival chip into, say, their modems would likely be denied government
contracts, as well asexport licenses for the NSA-proof products. Even that
may not appease the spymasters. "No one rules out a mandatory encryption
standard," says NIST spokesman Mat Heyman. That's industry's greatest fear,
which NIST will attempt to allay in meetings this week. And next week Rep.
Edward Markey holds hearings on whether NSA can keep the keys to its codes
safe from hackers. Or even Fleet Street.

SHARON BEGLEY with MELINDA LIU in Washington and JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

I got a call one week ago today (Tuesday May 25th) from Josh Ramo at
the science desk at Newsweek.  I spoke to him for about an hour on the
technicalities and politics of encryption.  He was to my pleasant
surprise quite able to follow a telephone description of how
Diffie-Hellman key exchange works (!) and was quite conducive to my
explanation of some of the less public aspects of the clipper project.

I think we got extremely good coverage in this article.  Here are some
of the aspects involved.

-- Josh mentioned that he had Dorothy Denning on his list of people to
call.  She did not get quoted; I did.  There's significance to that.

-- The pro-crypto quote came first.  Kammer's quote, on technical
matters, not political ones, came in the middle.  The scary ominous
'mandatory standard' quote, from NIST, came last.

-- They did not replay the White House line that skipjack is so much
harder to crack than DES.  I convinced Josh that by iterating DES, the
pracatical security of the underlying ciphers was the same, i.e.
impenetrable.  Thus, no propagation of half-truths.

-- The sub-headline is against false cryptography.

-- The phrase "civil libertarians and corporations" was used, implying
a united front across liberal/conservative lines against this
proposal.  This phrase was extremely clever on their behalf to avoid
specifically mentioning partisan politics.

-- The NSA is protrayed as demanding and coercive.  First they'll deny
government contracts and export licenses, and if that doesn't work,
they'll outlaw it.

-- Cellular phone are touted as insecure, implying that something
ought to be done about that.

-- The sidebar has an example of cryptography four millenia old;
that's respectable.

-- The article does not play up the escrow aspects of the wiretap
chip.  Their simplification, that the government has your key, attains
the root issue without confusion.

-- They mention that the keys wil have to be stored on computers, and
are thus vulnerable.  This a point I made specifically to Josh, and
they took my example of foreign intelligence and *expanded* on it.

--They mention that NIST worked on the algorithm with the NSA.

All in all, I don't think we could have hoped for better.  There's
just about nothing flattering said about the wiretap chip, and plenty
of things against it.  The article is about as anti-Clipper as you
might expect given that Newsweek does not want to appear too partisan
one way or another.

Eric