[3150] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: We don't need a PKI to build universal strong encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Carl Ellison)
Wed Aug 5 23:27:48 1998
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 1998 19:30:09 -0700
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
From: Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net, gnu@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <199808051750.KAA28487@toad.com>
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At 10:50 AM 8/5/98 -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
>Arnold Reinhold said:
>> I think what Hambre and FBI Director Freeh really fear is universal strong
>> encryption, where almost everyone's e-mail and even phone calls are
>> strongly encrypted just because they have Windows 2002 installed. Doing
>> that requires a public key infrastructure and that is not so easy to build.
>
>Universal strong encryption does NOT require a public-key infrastructure!
>
>The Diffie-Hellman "key agreement" protocol can agree on keys to
>protect 99.99% of the traffic with no additional public-key crypto,
>and no infrastructure. Widely deployed D-H that then keys Triple-DES
True. If the FBI pisses industry off enough, we might see phones and FAX
machines that do D-H with no purpose other than to prevent passive
eavesdropping.
But, to be realistic, as one of my co-workers said about the initial AT&T
DES phone -- if the gov't had just kept its mouth shut, AT&T would have sold
5 and then that division would have gone out of business. It's really hard
to sell crypto -- or was until the gov't declared itself an eavesdropper and
created a market.
- Carl
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+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.pobox.com/~cme |
| PGP: 08FF BA05 599B 49D2 23C6 6FFD 36BA D342 |
+--Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.-+
