1994-06-03 - Re: Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning

Header Data

From: thad@pdi.com (Thaddeus Beier)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: f4146eb784368c8797d1f2e3d8e037a78c98c7ebba7fe53b224ff21bbb3662ee
Message ID: <9406032240.AA09093@fulcrum.pdi.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1994-06-03 22:43:15 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 15:43:15 PDT

Raw message

From: thad@pdi.com (Thaddeus Beier)
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 15:43:15 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning
Message-ID: <9406032240.AA09093@fulcrum.pdi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Black Eye for NSA, NIST, and Denning

DEADBEAT sez
>> 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.
>

The importance is that the current justification for Clipper is

1. The benevolent government wanted us to have very good encryption
    so they gave us SKIPJACK, but 
2. They didn't want to hurt themselves by giving away something that
    they couldn't crack.

The Clipper apologists have retreated from the "we are going to use this
to catch criminals" posture to "let's give the citizens good encryption that
doesn't hurt us".  PGP et al was a devastating answer to the first position,
so that is why they abandoned it.  Blaze's result destroys the current
justification, they are giving us good encryption that they can't break.

There is then no reason to push Clipper, unless it is fixed, of course.

thad
Thad Beier  Pacific Data Images  408)745-6755  thad@pdi.com







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