🚀 go-pugleaf

Carl Ellison (cme@ellisun.sw.stratus.com) wrote:
: 
: Politics aside for a second, there's an interesting crypto problem here.


I think Carl is absolutely right. Besides the obvious policy and
philosophical issues, the Denning/Rivest key registration idea has
many "crypto protocol" aspects. Granted, it's not number theory, but
it's still part of the crypto family.

Some issues:

- Can encryption-within-encryption be detected? How?

- If noise is sent to foil traffic analysis, how will the
Denning/Rivest proposal deal with it? (The general issue that a person
can always shrug and say he was sending random bits. Are there
technical means of proving otherwise?)

- For n-out-of-m voting protocols (to reveal the key) are used, what
are reasonable values for n and m? (This related to the organization
of the "Independed Key Authority.")

- Can it be arranged that only a single message is openable? For
example, that the key to the last 3 years of messages _not_ be
released? (The authorities should only gain access to the _specific_
communication a search warrant is for, and not to all past messages,
for example. And a "wiretap" court order, allowing reading of all
messages, should also not allow reading of messages not covered.)

- What about applications like cryptograhic voting, digital money,
etc.? These systems often involve many keys, sometime generated during
execution of the protocol. How could these be handled?

- Psychologically (further afield from sci.crypt's charter), what will
be the effect on public confidence in such things as digital
signatures and timestamping if it is known that in principle the
government (or others) could obtain the private keys?


These and many other issues are clearly crypto protocol issues, albeit
with some heavy political overtones. Sci.crypt is a much better fit to
this issue than any other group I have seen.

And it is far better that we discuss and debate this issue here and
now with folks like Prof. Denning than that we ignore the issue and
then read about it as a piece of proposed legislation.
-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | PGP 2.0 and MailSafe keys by arrangement.