[2607] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Director of Central Intelligence on Trust
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Wed Apr 29 23:04:02 1998
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980428230524.009ec700@netcom5.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 13:05:15 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
The April 27 issue of Aviation Week reprints exerpts of an address by U.S.
Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet titled "Cyber War Threat
Is Real and Growing" (<http://www.aviationweek.com/aviation/avi_edit.htm>
should work until the next issue comes out.)
Tenet says the need now is for trust systems rather than security systems:
"Much of the public discussion and rhetoric is about encryption-with little
attention
focused on what is needed to make its use trustworthy. The technology to bring
good information security to networks is fairly well developed and
understood. It
is based on the use of public key encryption and digital signatures. The
means to
provide trust is less well understood and is called key management
infrastructure.
. . . Efforts to provide key management infrastructure services
for products with encryption are uncoordinated, immature and lagging the
introduction of electronic commerce services. "
He goes on to call for a renewed partnership with industry:
"The need for cooperation between government and industry in building
trustworthy
key management infrastructure is paramount to meeting our common interests of
networks that meet our business needs without introducing vulnerabilities
in those
systems. . . . If we are going to lead the world in information technology,
we must
recreate the trust between government and industry that allowed us to lead
for over
40 years. We still have the power to lead by our example and the time to do
what is
right."
The U.S. government's role in retarding the commercial development of trust
and encryption systems by way of export controls is not mentioned.
Arnold Reinhold
