re off the shelf cheap des keyseach machine was re corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip in article c uup wp news claremont edu ebrandt jarthur claremont edu eli brandt writes in article apr ulysses att com smb research att com steven bellovin writes remember that they ve promised to let a committee of outside experts see the cryptosystem design i hope there are some silicon jocks on the committee who can follow the algorithm through to hardware while i doubt the nsa would pull any monkey business on this point they have to expect that the chip will be reverse engineered sooner or later it s an obvious opportunity to introduce additional holes the chip isn t the place to pull the monkey business you do it in the key generation either by having a mathematical backdoor or by having the program on the laptop that supposedly generates the keys also save a copy of s and s and leak it out somehow or by having the program that supposedly puts the official keys on the chip actually put a different key there very hard to detect since the escrow agents have to either trust the nsa laptop or give each other the s keys and they still don t know the algorithm or have the chip burner at the factory make copies of the keys or whatever pray for peace bill bill stewart wcs anchor att com at t bell labs m holmdel nj no i m from new jersey i only work in cyberspace white house commect line fax
