[1178] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: German Official Pleas for Strong Encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael C Taylor)
Wed Jul 9 12:29:46 1997
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 10:11:31 -0300 (ADT)
From: Michael C Taylor <mctaylor@mta.ca>
To: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <m0wlegc-00084aC@fwd00.btx.dtag.de>
On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Axel H. Horns wrote:
> There are no crypto rules. The new Act on Digital Signatures defines
> a non-mandatory infrastructure of TTPs, but does not have any GAK
> provisions, see e.g.
>
> http://www.horns.netplace.de/iukdg/sigge.htm
>
> In particular, the TTPs are not allowed to hold any private keys. If
> legal regulations concering strong cryptography should ever come up
This seems very much like the Canadian Public Key Infrastructure
being coorientated by the Communication Security Establishment (under DND)
for use by the federal government. See
<http://www.cse.dnd.ca/cse/english/gov.html>
They want to be TTP or rather a CA to the federal government to encourage
digital signatures to be legally trusted. No GAK appears to be planned
and I've heard that Canada has said no to it, mainly because they don't
want Canadian companies enscrowed with classified US technologies.
They plan to use products from Entrust Technologies
<http://www.entrust.com/>, a spin-off from Northern Telecom.
--
Michael C. Taylor <mctaylor@mta.ca> <http://www.mta.ca/~mctaylor/>
Programmer, Computing Services, Mount Allison University, Canada
