[1579] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Crypto Keys as Spam
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Charles Platt)
Tue Sep 23 11:35:33 1997
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 00:41:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <cp@panix.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
cc: Charles Platt <cp@panix.com>
In-Reply-To: <199709230250.AA12239@swan.lcs.mit.edu>
If we do suffer a federal law that mandates key escrow and survives
constitutional tests, would it be possible to screw the system by
generating huge numbers of crypto keys for federal storage? Imagine,
say, 100,000 people each contributing a million different keys to the
federal registry.
This kind of civil disobedience would be impractical, of course, if a
filing fee were charged for receipt and registration of each key. Still,
other forms of disobedience (already developed in anti-spam-site
offensives) suggest themselves if keys are to be transmitted to a federal
registry via the net.
Overall, I find it hard to see how key escrow would be practical on a very
large scale, for reasons such as these. After all, InterNIC has trouble
merely managing email addresses.
--CP
