re clipper chip technical details short summary of what bellovin says hellman says the nsa says there is a global key g plus one key u c for each chip c the user can choose a new session key k p for each phone call p he makes chip c knows three keys g its own u c and the user s k p the government as a whole knows g and every u c apparently a message m is encrypted as e g e u c k p c e k p m that s it the system as described here can t possibly work what happens when someone plugs the above ciphertext into a receiving chip to get m the receiving chip needs k p to get k p the receiving chip needs u c the only information it can work with is c if u c can be computed from c then the system is cryptographically useless and the key escrow is bullshit otherwise how is a message decrypted dan
