Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning

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On the one hand, I applaud Dr. Blaze for the discoveries based on his
black-box analysis of the NSA product.  How fortunate to have him
working in a laboratory seeded with this gear.

On the other hand, I am amused at the "big deal" being made about such
a minor result.  This "protocol failure" exposes the NSA product to no
new threats.  If one's objective is to use SKIPJACK but to defeat key
escrow, pre-encryption is easier, conceptually simpler, and may be more
secure, depending on what is actually inside the SKIPJACK code.

I won't ask why the big deal is being made about all of this -- the
agenda surrounding Clipper and friends is clearly a political one, not
a technical one, so it is no surprise to hear even the technical voices,
i.e., this list, trumpeting Blaze's paper as though it were a dagger in
the heart of SKIPJACK.  But let's all acknowledge the technical weight
and importance of Blaze's result for what it is: minuscule.

DEADBEAT <na5877@anon.penet.fi>

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deadbeat wrote:

| On the one hand, I applaud Dr. Blaze for the discoveries based on his
| black-box analysis of the NSA product.  How fortunate to have him
| working in a laboratory seeded with this gear.
| 
| On the other hand, I am amused at the "big deal" being made about such
| a minor result.  This "protocol failure" exposes the NSA product to no
| new threats.  If one's objective is to use SKIPJACK but to defeat key
| escrow, pre-encryption is easier, conceptually simpler, and may be more
| secure, depending on what is actually inside the SKIPJACK code.

	Actually, Blaze's work does nullify one important aspect of
Clipper that pre-encryption does not address, and that is traffic
analasis.

Adam


-- 
Adam Shostack 				       adam@bwh.harvard.edu

Politics.  From the greek "poly," meaning many, and ticks, a small,
annoying bloodsucker.

> But let's all acknowledge the technical weight
> and importance of Blaze's result for what it is: minuscule.

I'd love to see Mr. Deadbeat try to produce a similar result some
time. However, even beyond the raw intellectual achievement, Matt's
result is Pretty Good technically. He showed a major flaw in the
proposed escrowed encryption protocol that renders it pretty much
valueless. Deadbeat misses the boat when he notes you can pre-encrypt
-- with Matt's technique, I can actually interoperate with someone who
isn't attempting to avoid escrow. I'd like to see Deadbeat explain how
to manage that via any other method than the one proposed.

Perry