[1551] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Gov. key management costs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Reusch)
Sat Sep 20 23:29:39 1997
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 23:20:18 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Reusch <reusch@home.com>
For a rough estimate of key management cost to government, might one assume
that storage
of keys this amounts in size to say about what the IRS stores in income
data per person per year.
Not much when you think about it. That this implies an equally large or
perhaps larger bureaucracy
and computer system for the necessary strict verifications, authentications
and audits. Private
companies will require, as they do now for income reporting, a
substantially larger data base,
bureaucracy and computational power to handle the larger volume of
corporate escrow requirements.
Then, don't we have to multiply by a factor of at least two because likely
their have to be
at least two relatively independent agencies. Thus, a rough order of
magnitude estimate would
be about 3X the IRS if everybody in the US was escrowed. This neglects
requests
from overseas and the frequent whoops, I lost my keys, applications. Still,
perhaps 3X the IRS?
