[3498] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
IAB, BXA, Cisco, Reinsch, Aarons - Private Doorbells
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vin McLellan)
Fri Oct 16 14:43:19 1998
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:07:39 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net>
Perry offered the Internet Activities Board's 15 October statement
on "private doorbell" encryption.
The IAB statement is probably best understood if you first read the
recent interview with US Under Secretary of Commerce William Reinsch in the
recent issue of Information Security magazine. See:
<http://www.infosecuritymag.com/sept/q%26a.htm>
Mr.Reinsch, the guy who runs the DoC's Bureau of Export
Administration (BXA), seems to be the Clinton Administration's domestic
point man on crypto export policy. It is one of Reinsch's more endearing
qualities that he also seems self-conscious about the subtle interaction
between his BXA export controls on crypto, the overseas market for
crypto-enhanced products, and the type of crypto that gets sold and bought
in the domestic US market.
Many in the industry now see the US government's export controls
less as a program to control non-Americans' access to strong crypto, and
more of a bludgeon to force hopeful exporters into secret deals with the
NSA and FBI. Getting a crypto export license in the US is not a public or
transparent process. In recent years, the government approval process has
typically involved such arbitrary judgements on the part of the Commerce
Department and NSA staff that there has been no rational way of predicting
if a product will be approved or not. Such a process leaves a lot of room
for quiet deals and maximizes the government 's ability to apply pressure
on corporations.
In this magazine interview, Reinsch offers an awkward summary of US
policy on export controls and/or domestic crypto controls. US crypto
export regs and the Clinton Administration's policy on cryptography in the
recent issue of Information Security magazine. See:
<http://www.infosecuritymag.com/sept/q%26a.htm>
The article makes a fascinating counterpoint to the Oct. 13 speech
on US Crypto Policy by US Under Secretary of Commerce (for International
Trade) David Aaron before the Federation of German Chambers of Industry and
Commerce. See: <http://jya.com/aaron101398.htm>
Aaron actually gives a better and more informed summary of US
export regs, but Reinsch is able to at least acknowledge that the US
intelligence community and US eavesdroppers overseas are players in US
crypto policy.
(Aaron, in Germany, had to make believe that US controls on crypto
export -- and the overseas push to get other nations to restrict the
quality of the crypto their citizens are permitted to use -- is simply an
initiative on the part of the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies.
The War against child porn, drugs, terrorism, etc., etc.)
Reinsch's suggestion that the US software firms which were forced
to design key and message recovery versions of their cryptographic or
crypto-enhanced products (because that was the _only_ way they could
service their overseas customers with 56-bit crypto rather than 40-bit
crypto) are doing this development because they smell a Market Demand (not
because they had been blackmailed) is notably ludicrous, but par for the
course.
Other than that, the most striking thing about this interview was
the way Reinsch positioned Cisco's "Private Doorbell" proposal as a
potential solution to the NSA's long-term fears about strong crypto in
e-mail and other communication services used by non-Americans and outside
the US.
Reinsch suggested that the Cisco-crafted proposal -- basically, a
loud suggestion that the government should wake up to the potential of
obtaining cleartext from the managers of link-encryption switches and
servers, and quit bothering honest merchants trying to sell
link-crypto-enabled network equipment overseas -- suggested a "compromise"
solution to the thorny issue of eavesdropping options for encrypted e-mail
and other communications.
The way Reinsch used it to redefine e-mail security may have
surprised a lot of people (including, I'm sure, the Cisco staff who
originally developed the concept.)
Reinsch seems to believe that Cisco's "Private Doorbell" initiative
-- or perhaps some other mega-trend his advisors have perceived --
indicates that corporate buyers (in the US and/or overseas, as a matter of
policy) will begin to deny employees (or customers) access to PC-based
end-to-end crypto... and will instead force them to "secure" e-mail and
other communications soley with link-encryption or crypto systems with
overt corporate-message-recovery (CMR) options.
As an alternative to end-to-end crypto for e-mail, this sounds
fairly far-fetched... until you recall the mechanics of PGP for Business
(one of the NSA's quiet domestic triumphs) and the US Government-approved
cryptographic security offered in Microsoft's new WebTV product.
WebTV has just been licensed by Reinsch's BXA to be sold almost
anywhere overseas with e-mail and other messaging options protected by a
128-bit RC4 cryptosystem. E-mail, http, and WebTV command channel messages
are passed up to the WebTV server, protected by 128-bit RC4 in a
proprietary VPN protocol. (The WebTV designers were not allowed to use
SSL.) Given the BXA export permit, I presume that WebTV messages are
potentially accessible at the WebTV server, before they are passed over to
the Internet.
The implications of this new US Govt fixation on the network
servers and switches as the access point for surreptitous eavesdropping on
e-mail and communications protocols apparently surprised the Internet
Society too.
Yesterday (within a day or two of the Reinsch interview being
published on-line, I believe) the Internet Activities Board and the IESG --
the political and technical High Command for the Internet -- punched out a
brief but forceful policy document which directly challenged Reinsch's
expectations.
The IAB pointed out that the idea of network switches as effective
Points of Interception only works if you presume that there are other
restrictions on people's use of strong end-to-end crypto at the desktop.
Such restrictions are overtly counterproductive, they said, and threaten to
"warp the protocol structure" -- whatever that might mean.
"This is in conflict with the "end-to-end" principle, a fundamental
tenet of the Internet architecture," warned the Board. To require link
encryption "in all places (and to exclude end-to-end encryption) would warp
the protocol structure. Furthermore, it offers a significantly lower level
of security, in that there is no longer protection against inside attacks,
which by all accounts are a serious threat."
Reinsch, in his interview, said that he expected employers to deny
employees access to desktop end-to-end crypto, and force them to rely upon
network crypto,"for employee control purposes."
He seemed certain that corporate distrust of employees -- in
America? in Social Democratic Europe? -- is strong enough to outweigh the
security benefits of end-to-end crypto and justify a vast impowerment of
corporate rent-a-cops (who, in this scenario, are usually expected to read,
vet, and report upon all e-mail and file transfers through the corporate
firewall.)
This is actually a more plausible argument today than it has been
anytime in the past 20 years. Most companies have only connected to the Net
in the past five years and social conventions have not yet evolved. Many US
companies are still confused about how to deal with the "legal" opportunity
to listen or filter their employee's at-work use of the Internet.
While many Europeans find this sort of routine surveillance of
employees amazing -- and many European nations outlaw it -- in the
libertarian US, there are few constraints on employers and few privacy
rights for employees on the job. As a result, the rent-a-cop surveillance
model is being tried in many US companies, and the various online
discussion groups for Firewall experts are full of vendors and consultants
promoting various keyword and delay-loop technologies for corporate
eavesdropping on employee communications. As might be expected, the US
government is also promoting it in the Defense industries, the government
market, and in the regulated US finance and brokerage industries.
Given all the marketing noise today about content filters and the
talk of censors (human and virtual) for information flowing through the
corporate firewall, I can see where the FBI (and maybe even the NSA) finds
hope in this analysis. The FBI gets what it wants overseas (and that may
make it more likely they will get it in the US too) and the NSA gets an
inherently weaker communications security system -- which is about the best
they can expect in the light of day anyway.
As the IAB quickly concluded, however, none of these "Private
Doorbell" pipe dreams mean much of anything unless strong end-to-end crypto
is forbidden, by national law or corporate conventions.
Even in the US corporate culture, that assumption seems a long shot.
We have ahead of us both Clinton's Presidential Impeachment
Hearings and one or several Microsoft antitrust cases. These are two
seminal legal and political events which can be expected to trenchantly
highlight the dangers of collecting old memos (all memos?) in some musty
archive -- and/or rashly presuming that data "erased" on a hard disk is
truly gone.
Many impressionable minds (lawyers and CIOs among them) will be led
to the conclusion that keeping records of everything you write, or
everything your employees write -- or letting the System keep such records
-- is idiotic, irresponsible, and self-destructive.
There is also a deeply-rooted US corporate tradition of restricting
access to sensitive info on a Need-to-Know basis. Surveillance isn't really
the same thing as personnel managment, but US government and DoD folks
often confuse the two. In the military, an elite class of employees (with
security clearances) watches everyone else, and handles informations that
others are not allowed to know or touch. The corporate world doesn't think
that way or work on that model. That is something one might expect the NSA
and others to have learned in the 20 years they tried to restructure the US
computer market to fit the MLS Orange Book.
Suerte,
_Vin
-----
"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for
good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by
its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who
deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
_ A Thinking Man's Creed for Crypto _vbm.
* Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> *
53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548
