[2829] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: NSA Declassifies Algos
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Wed Jun 24 01:03:07 1998
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cryptography@c2.net
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 11:46:12 (NZST)
John Young <jya@pipeline.com> writes:
>The Department of Defense today announced the decision by the National
>Security Agency to declassify both the Key Exchange Algorithm and the SKIPJACK
>encryption algorithm used in the FORTEZZA(tm) personal computer card.
>FORTEZZA(tm) provides security at the desktop in the Defense Message System
>and other DoD applications. This marks the first time that the NSA has
>declassified such information and made it commercially available.
Two thoughts on this:
If the NSA is planning to make a submission for AES, a modified Skipjack would
be perfect since they've already gone to a lot of effort to make sure it won't
leak any useful design principles if it's revealed, and in any case keeping it
secret is pretty pointless now that Clipper/whatever is dead.
Another reason for declassifying it may be to make Fortezza cards more
attractive to foreign governments. The Australian government, for example, was
all set to go with Fortezza cards but the DSD balked at approving them because
the NSA wouldn't release the Skipjack details and they didn't want to use an
unknown algorithm. As a result they went with a local supplier instead - but
for the non-availability of the Skipjack details, the Australian government
would have been using Fortezza cards. There are other governments which are
seriously looking at Fortezza as well, so having Skipjack and KEA secret is
having the effect of providing foreign government support for local crypto
development, which probably doesn't fit in with the NSA's desire to make
other governments dependant on US-supplied crypto.
Peter.
