Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:17:38
mgraffam@idsi.net
Thu, 24 Dec 1998 05:53:51 -0500 (EST)
On Thu, 24 Dec 1998, Sameer Parekh wrote:
> > in and working within the bounds of the Wassenaar agreement is the essence
> > of giving up liberty to gain security. As Ben Franklin about his views on
>
> You'd be giving up security too.
Well, I don't know about that; strictly speaking.
When it comes to my acceptance of a crypto algorithm, I am pretty
conservative. I still use DES for all my stuff .. with triple encryption
and independant keys, of course.. I trust this far more than I trust
IDEA or CAST, and far more than I'll trust AES.
And, I think most people knowledgable about crypto would also take 3DES
when push comes to shove.
If you have a 3g message to encrypt, and you _know_ major governments are
going to spend time trying to get the plaintext what do you choose?
(and OTP's aren't fair game, btw?). I think most people would choose 3DES.
This is not to say that I like the fact that 56 bits is the upper limit.
So, 56 bits is exportable. We write code that can accept some arbitrary
56-bit cipher and use that cipher as the base for triple encryption. This
wrapper code will be exportable (contains no crypto, its just a for
loop, basically) and people can plug in their favorite DES implementation.
Done. Strong crypto.
Not to mention, PGP is out there .. c'mon I'd wager that there is a copy
of PGP in every country on planet.
I don't see Wassenaar affecting the strength of private communication
today; I see it affecting the development new privacy-guarding
technologies .. which is still no damn good.
I'm not sure if civil disobedience of Wassanaar is the greatest thing at
this point. If major crypto archives export their material, those archives
will be shut down and then the citizens of those countries won't have
anywhere to get good tools. Ideally, for every archive that is taken down
4 more would pop up, but I don't think we have that sort of man-power to
work with here .. lets face it, we are out-manned and out-gunned as far
as the courts go. The only advantage we have is that They can't read our
plans :)
Michael J. Graffam (mgraffam@idsi.net)
"Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."
Henry David Thoreau "Civil Disobedience"
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:17:38