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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:55
William H. Geiger III (whgiii@openpgp.net)
Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:41:58 -0500
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In <19980804205222.17155.qmail@iq.org>, on 08/05/98
at 06:52 AM, proff@iq.org said:
>-- Start of PGP signed section.
>> In <199808041827.OAA19518@homeport.org>, on 08/04/98
>> at 02:27 PM, Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org> said:
>>
>> >NTT and RSA Japan.
>>
>> >The chips are not exportable under new regulations imposed by (as I
>> >recall) MITI.
>>
>> I am rather underwhelmed by hardware based crypto. There is just no way of
>> verifying that these systems are doing what they claim to be doing. It is
>> just too easy to fudge the books without anyone knowing.
>>
>> Perhaps I am getting too cynical in my old age but there are no big
>> electronics shops that I would trust to build crypto hardware. They are
>> all too dependent on government contracts.
>This is why hardware algorithms without sub-liminal channels are so
>important. If your (trusted) software algorithms are sub-liminal channel
>free, and the hardware is forced to inter-operate with them, then
>back-doors are (almost) a non-issue. I say `almost', because although the
>device isn't going to be randomly leaking keybits, it may be responsive
>to an active attack. e.g chosen plain text triggers, RF stimulation, or a
>preset timer. However, this is likely to cause inter-operatability
>problems. The important question is, can those problems be falsely
>attributed to some other cause (e.g signal errors)?
Where my concern was centered was more in the key generation than it was
the actual encryption routines (though you make a good point about
sub-liminal channels). I can have a hardware device that is on the up and
up when it comes to the actual encryption but generates the keys in some
weakened fashion that makes breaking them much easier.
I can also see room in the RNG for playing around to affect both the
keygen and the encryption process.
- --
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William H. Geiger III http://www.openpgp.net
Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0
Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 5.0 at: http://www.openpgp.net/pgp.html
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Tag-O-Matic: Program call to load Windows- "Here_piggy_piggy_piggy"
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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:55