From: thad@hammerhead.com (Thaddeus J. Beier)
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 20:44:43 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: How I Would Ban Strong Crypto in the U.S.
Message-ID: <199607160436.VAA15790@hammerhead.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I agree with Raph's analysis, that for something like RSA encryption
to work, you need to have a strong public key infrastructure, and that
the Gov't could probably build one that people would use; and that would
destroy their privacy.

My prediction, though, is that because Diffie-Hellmann loses its patent
protection so soon, in just over a year now, that RSA, or any persistent-key
system, will not tend to be used for e-mail, phone conversations, or other
types of communication; for D-H, no infrastructure need be in place.
Now, it's true that you can't use D-H for authentication, and that is
a tremendous disadvantage.  Still, you could use the established
gov't PKI to do the authentication, and use D-H for the exchange of
keys.

thad
-- Thaddeus Beier                     thad@hammerhead.com
   Visual Effects Supervisor                408) 286-3376
   Hammerhead Productions        http://www.got.net/~thad