how to escrow if escrowing were ok there is a description of something called a fair crypto system in the may issue of byte p attributed to mit professor silvio micali the way it works is as follows you generate your private key s and break it up into pieces s s s s and s such that s s s mod p s you give each piece s s etc to a different escrow agency the agencies each compute g sn mod p and forward the result to the public key telephone book keeper the public key telephone book keeper multiplies all the g sn mod p reduces the result to mod p and this will be the user s public key now if there were several hundered recognized escrow agencies and the user could give a piece of the key to each of the ones he trusted the result would be something of an improvement over the proposed clipper system i still don t think key escrow is a good idea for both philosophical and security reasons but i do offer this suggestion simply to determine whether escrow advocates are at all interested in considering alternatives in good faith or whether the goal is to insure the use of only two agencies selected for spinelessness in the face of official requests
