From: perry@imsi.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 94 10:34:12 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: what I can say...
Message-ID: <9406021734.AA16072@webster.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Having seen Matt's paper, and having been asked by him not to
distribute it, I feel somewhat obligated not to give any details. The
complete method can actually be determined from the newspaper article
(which was astonishingly lucid, all things considered) but having been
"mentally contaminated" its not ethical for me to describe
it. However, I'll say this.

1) He found a beautiful little defect -- it can be explained in a
   couple of lines, and it seems obvious, but somehow no one but Matt
   saw it. Its a classic -- he deserves lots of kudos. It permits full
   interoperability between a "rogue" Tessera user and a
   non-rogue user.
2) Its likely that a redesign of the EES (escrowed encryption
   standard) could avoid this defect. Whether it could avoid all
   defects is, of course, unknowable -- but the current design is
   simply flawed and does not truly achieve its stated goal.
3) If the NSA actually worked for years designing this thing, someone
   wasn't thinking.

Perry