From: Carl Ellison <cme@tis.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 15:03:46 PDT
To: m5@vail.tivoli.com
Subject: Re: Clipper Chip Retreat
In-Reply-To: <9407212138.AA20166@vail.tivoli.com>
Message-ID: <9407212203.AA15301@tis.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 16:38:02 CDT
>From: m5@vail.tivoli.com (Mike McNally)
>Subject: Re: Clipper Chip Retreat
>
>Carl Ellison writes:
> > Sorry, but the major Clipper flaw to me (and at least one corporate 
> > executive with whom I've discussed this) *is* the very idea of key
> > escrow. 
>
>Agreed; however, I don't see what good (from the standpoint of the key
>escrow fan club) a non-classified Skipjack would be, other than to
>make the banning of non-escrowed cryptography "ineluctable".

I don't care about Skipjack.  If they want to publish, I'd read the paper,
but I'm plenty content with triple-DES for routine stuff and DTDTD
(des|tran|...) for more sensitive stuff.  (ditto with IDEA variants)

By key length, triple-DES is far more secure than Skipjack -- and probably
faster.  I don't remember the Clipper data rate off hand, but I just timed
RSAREF triple-DES (CBC) on my 66 MHz 486 (running Mach) at 112 KBytes/sec.
(That's just short of 1 Mb/sec.)  That would do for telephone speeds :-).

 - Carl