From: frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 16:18:31 -0800 (PST)
To: "Timothy C. May" <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: HP announcing some International Cryptography stuff on Monday
Message-ID: <199611180018.QAA10957@netcom6.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 12:49 PM 11/15/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>It sounds ominous to me. Another backroom deal, probably for some form of
>key recovery strategy, aka GAK.

I'd bet GAK too.  RSADSI has been working on GAK protocols, so these ones
might actually work.  I feel as pessimistic about this one as Lucky usually
is.

At 12:05 PM 11/15/96 -0800, John Gilmore wrote:
>Are they the next Big Company to knuckle under to the Feds?  Their
>pcmcia-with-local-country-surveillance-chip-socket initiative never
>seemed to go anywhere.

Since I am inherently optimistic, one ray of light may be that the San Jose
Mercury News was mentioning the ability to export the system, and then when
the necessary licenses (US and foreign) were obtained, turn on the
encryption.  I guess from this that the encryption is in hardware.  Now,
software/hardware interfaces are usually fairly simple, so what we have
here is a software system with a crypto hook.


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