From: Ray Arachelian <sunder@brainlink.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 1996 06:27:00 +0800
To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: monkey-wrenching GAK
In-Reply-To: <199609182148.WAA00346@server.test.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960919124210.21961F@beast.brainlink.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Wed, 18 Sep 1996, Adam Back wrote:

> 3) Monkey-wrenching 
> 
> Even with GAK, where you are forced to give the government the keys,
> you can do much to make the job of administering GAK very expensive.
> You start by ensuring that the government can not get your encrypted
> data (the other half of the secret share), so that the key is of no
> use :-)

Another thing you can do: generate huge key pairs all day long and submit 
them to the NSA.  If enough people do this, they will be flooded and 
overworked, of course they may ignore them, etc, or make it hard to do 
so, but if everyone generates a 4K key every hour or two and discards it, 
but gives the key pair to the NSA anyway, they will run out of storage 
space, or at least it will make it much much harder for them to figgure 
out which key you are using for conversation X.

You can also generate a lot of /dev/null traffic by sending encrypted 
random garbage through remailers signed and encrypted with those random 
discard keys - apparently to yourself - but instruct the xth remailer in 
the chain to just drop it.

Make it hard for them to know which of your 10000 keys is the one you 
truly use. :)

This assumes many many things: like you are allowed to generate your own 
key, you are allowed to make the submissions electronically to the NSA, 
etc, so caveat emptors are all over the place here. :)  Still, it's one 
suggestion.

=============================================================================
 + ^ + |  Ray Arachelian    |FL|       KAOS KERAUNOS KYBERNETOS      |==/|\==
  \|/  |sunder@brainlink.com|UL|__Nothing_is_true,_all_is_permitted!_|=/\|/\=
<--+-->| ------------------ |CG|What part of 'Congress shall make no |=\/|\/=
  /|\  | Just Say "No" to   |KA|law abridging the freedom of speech' |==\|/==
 + v + | Janet Reno & GAK   |AK|        do you not understand?       |=======
===================http://www.brainlink.org/~sunder/=========================
           ActiveX! ActiveX! Format Hard drive? Just say yes!