[1251] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Fortezza dying on the vine?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew James Gering)
Fri Jul 25 18:30:23 1997
From: "Matthew James Gering" <mgering@ricochet.net>
To: <cryptography@c2.net>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 15:01:47 -0700
>This is THE important point, IMO. It is mundane commerce that is the
>real force to reckon with in all the crypto debates. To the extent
>that business wants key recovery mechanisms, there will be key
>recovery mechanisms. The US gov may be able to bend things somewhat,
>but the bottom line is the needs of commerce are what will drive things.
The critical aspect of key-escrow is that there are uses where a company
would want a key-recovery scheme (secure data storage), and there are others
where it must be absolutely prohibitted (authentication, no-repudable
signatures, communications encryption) for security reasons. Only the
inter-oganizational uses (without pre-existing relationship) of the latter
need to be part of a global PKI, therefore the market will not bear
key-escrow as part of a PKI. The market will never accept GAK for commerce
applications.
Matt
