Re: How might new GAK be enforced?

>Tim May asks:
>
>: Any other ideas on how the government plans to enforce GAK, to make GAK the
>: overwhelmingly-preferred solution?
>
>The problem seems somewhat analogous to the software copy protection
>problem and maybe the enfocement will be similar: make "examples" of a
>few high profile offenders who are exchanging blatantly un-GAKed
>traffic with foreigners. This assumes they fine tune the law to make
>such behavior illegal without having to prove you yourself exported
>the stuff to them. Wonder what the Supremes will say to that.

Another possible monkey wrench is to send non-GAK messages containg random
data.  Since the entropy of encrypted and RNG data should be identical you
can always maintain the messages contain nothing at all and cannot produce
a decrypt key since none exists.

>
>But that's not the end of the story. If there is lots of GAK encrypted
>traffic flowing about, then encrypted traffic in general is no longer
>noteworthy. So as long as your traffic looks like GAK, you won't be
>hassled until they try to read your traffic.

See above comment.

>
>So it's possible that products will appear that use pseudo-GAK
>protocols -- they look just like their GAKed cousins but the GAK
>fields contain plausiable garbage instead of keys. It could even
>turn out to be a vendor "quality control" thing -- oops, the GAK
>was supposed to work but...
>
>You couldn't do that with Clipper (except via Matt Blaze's brute
>forcing of the LEAF checksum) because the crypto wouldn't decrypt a
>packet with an invalid LEAF checksum. Since it was a sealed hardware
>module, implementers had no choice but to play by those rules. There's
>no such enforcable limitation on commercial software implementations.

Another casuality could be anonymity.  Once GAK is in place, look for a
requirement for Clipper cards in order to access ISPs.

-- Steve




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On Wed, 2 Oct 1996, Steve Schear wrote:

> Another possible monkey wrench is to send non-GAK messages containg random
> data.  Since the entropy of encrypted and RNG data should be identical you

	Send things like the contents of  alt.binary.pictures.something
	only use every other line of the encoded material in them.

	Intersperse that with your normal e-mail, and never have
	headers for anything.    

	And lets not forget that alt.binary.pictures.something is a
	great place to send/recieve encrypted messages that 99.99%
	of the viewers won't realize are encrypted messages.