[411] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Britain to ban free use of crypto?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Trei)
Fri Mar 21 15:40:43 1997
From: "Peter Trei" <trei@process.com>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, cryptography@c2.net
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 15:24:14 -6
Reply-to: trei@process.com
CC: trei@c2.net
I pass on this message, lifted from the sci.crypto
newsgroup.
Peter Trei
trei@process.com
---------------------------------------------
From: rja14@cl.cam.ac.uk (Ross Anderson)
Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp,alt.security,sci.crypt
Subject: UK Government to ban PGP - now official!
Date: 21 Mar 1997 10:07:22 GMT
Message-ID: <5gtmkq$7ns@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>
The British government's Department of Trade and Industry has sneaked
out proposals on licensing encryption services. Their effect will be to
ban PGP and much more besides.
I have put a copy on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/dti.html as
their own web server appears to be conveniently down.
Licensing will be mandatory:
We intend that it will be a criminal offence for a body to offer
or provide licensable encryption services to the UK public without
a valid licence
The scope of licensing is broad:
Public will be defined to cover any natural or legal person in the UK.
Encryption services is meant to encompass any service, whether provided
free or not, which involves any or all of the following cryptographic
functionality - key management, key recovery, key certification, key
storage, message integrity (through the use of digital signatures) key
generation, time stamping, or key revocation services (whether for
integrity or confidentiality), which are offered in a manner which
allows a client to determine a choice of cryptographic key or allows
the client a choice of recipient/s.
Total official discretion is retained:
The legislation will provide that bodies wishing to offer or provide
encryption services to the public in the UK will be required to
obtain a licence. The legislation will give the Secretary of State
discretion to determine appropriate licence conditions.
The licence conditions imply that only large organisations will be able to
get licences: small organisations will have to use large ones to manage
their keys (this was the policy outlined last June by a DTI spokesman).
The main licence condition is of course that keys must be escrowed, and
delivered on demand to a central repository within one hour. The mere
delivery of decrypted plaintext is not acceptable except perhaps from
TTPs overseas under international agreements.
The effect of all this appears to be:
1. PGP servers will be outlawed; it will be an offence for me to sign
your pgp key, for you to sign mine, and for anybody to put my
existing signed PGP key in a foreign (unlicensed) directory
2. Countries that won't escrow, such as Holland and Denmark, will be
cut out of the Superhighway economy. You won't even be able to
send signed medical records back and forth (let alone encrypted
ones)
3. You can forget about building distributed secure systems, as even
relatively primitive products such as Kerberos would need to have
their keys managed by a licensed TTP. This is clearly impractical.
(The paper does say that purely intra-company key management is
OK
but licensing is required whenever there is any interaction with
the outside world, which presumably catches systems with mail, web
or whatever)
There are let-outs for banks and Rupert Murdoch:
Encryption services as an integral part of another service (such as in
the scrambling of pay TV programmes or the authentication of credit
cards) are also excluded from this legislation.
However, there are no let-outs for services providing only authenticity and
nonrepudiation (as opposed to confidentiality) services. This is a point that
has been raised repeatedly by doctors, lawyers and others - giving a police
officer the power to inspect my medical records might just conceivably help
him build a case against me, but giving him the power to forge prescriptions
and legal contracts appears a recipe for disaster. The scope for fraud and
corruption will be immense.
Yet the government continues to insist on control of, and access to, signing
keys as well as decryption keys. This shows that the real concern is not
really law enforcement at all, but national intelligence.
Finally, there's an opportunity to write in and protest:
The Government invites comments on this paper until 30 May 1997
Though if the recent `consultation' about the recent `government.direct'
programme is anything to go by, negative comments will simply be ignored.
Meanwhile, GCHQ is pressing ahead with the implementation of an escrow
protocol (see http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/GCHQ/casm.htm) that is broken
(see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/euroclipper.ps.gz).
In Grey's words, ``All over Europe, the lights are going out''
Ross
