corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip strnlght netcom com david sternlight writes what follows is my opinion it is not asserted to be the truth so no flames please it comes out of a background of years as a senior corporate staff executive in two fortune companies i d be happy to use a crypto system supplied by the nsa for business if they told me it was more secure than des and in particular resistant to attempts by japanese french and other competitive companies and governments to break i d be happy to do so even with escrowed keys provided i was happy about the bona fides of the escrow agencies the federal reserve would certainly satisfy me as would something set up by one of the big accounting firms i don t doubt that this will be the attitude of many corporate leaders it s understandable most corporate execs don t know much about cryptology and it s easy to get taken in by someone peddling snake oil and the proposed scheme is a major improvement in telephone security to what exists now the problem is that with any security scheme of this kind you have to concern yourself with the weakest link in the chain i suspect that nsa has put a fairly strong encryption algorithm in this wiretap chip of theirs probably at least as strong as say des in ofb mode unfortunately the existence of the key registry system seems to make possible all kinds of possible attacks at a small fraction of the expense of trying to build say a des keysearch machine as originally described it sounded like any police court combination could acquire the key for a given chip i hope that s not the case since it would imply a glaring hole how much does it cost to find one crooked jodge and one crooked cop especially for a foreign intelligence agency or organized crime boss however even if more intelligent schemes are used to allow access to the unencrypted phone conversations there will be weak nesses they may be very expensive and very difficult but who would trust his her confidential information to an encryption scheme that for say could by cracked one time in a hundred des for all the complaints about a bit key would probably cost several million dollars to build a keysearch machine for how many million dollars would the confidential phone messages of the gm headquarters be worth to nissan chrysler or audi how about home phones of major execs and important engineers and designers gee mr jones i understand you ve had some financial problems lately maybe i can help i d trust something from the nsa long before i d trust something from some swiss or anybody japanese indeed if nsa really designed the algorithm to be secure it s very likely as secure as idea or key des however the system as a whole isn t resistant to practical cryptanalysis in the puzzle palace bamford describes how several nsa employees were turned by foreign presumably kgb agents despite security measures that i doubt any big accounting firm could match and nsa confidential data was not subject to being requested by thousands of police organizations and courts across the land john kelsey c mizzou missouri edu
