[1159] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Supreme Court dicta on safe combinations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Thu Jul 3 09:31:24 1997
In-Reply-To: <199707021820.LAA06880@homer.ka9q.ampr.org>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 19:40:04 -0700
To: Phil Karn <karn@ka9q.ampr.org>
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net, ddt@pgp.com
At 11:20 AM -0700 7/2/97, Phil Karn wrote:
>The more I read Doe v US, the darker it looks for those who would like
>to use the Fifth Amendment to protect their encryption keys -- despite
>the dicta in Footnote 9. If this issue went to the Supreme Court,
>Stevens is the only one Justice you could count on (he wrote the lone
>dissent).
I'm glad I am now professionally testing ways of seeding secure random
number generators. I need to generate a lot of seed data and apply
statistical tests to it to try and see non-randomness. Since many of these
sources are slow, I write the data to files so I can re-run my tests. I
guess I'll just keep these files for a while. (N.B. I know the tests can't
prove goodness, but they might be able to detect badness.)
>Perfect forward secrecy is looking more and more vital all the time.
>At least where it applies, i.e., for communications.
It should be possible to have perfect forward secrecy for 2-way email. The
options for doing it (e.g. DH) are the same as for IP connections, just
slower.
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