4 ms·
Still, I believe it's wrong to distract here from all the other important topics addressed by Ray Ozzie, who was aware of all the important issues even in 1996,
by acqq 7y ago
Still, I believe it's wrong to distract here from all the other important topics addressed by Ray Ozzie, who was aware of all the important issues even in 1996, and for historical context of the NSA key from the title, here is the relevant part from his speech he gave in 1996, about how Lotus implemented what was legally required from them:
"As you know, the U.S. government has defined its "maximum tolerance
level" for exportable unescrowed cryptography at 40 bits. That is,
because they generally permit the export of 40-bit products, the U.S.
government is clearly already willing to deal with a 40-bit work
factor in order to examine encrypted communications outside of this
country.
So, the system that we're shipping in Lotus Notes Release 4 overseas
is one that presents different work factors to different parties,
hence the name.
Against crackers -- against the run-of-the-mill adversary trying to
break a message -- the work factor is 64 bits, just like it is in the
U.S. That is, in the new International Edition of Lotus Notes, bulk
data keys are now 64 bits just as they are in our North American
Edition that's sold in the U.S. and Canada.
But when the U.S. Government needs access to a communications stream
overseas encoded by the international edition of Lotus Notes, they are
no worse off - and no better off - than they are today - they have to
crack 40 bits."
Since then, the goals of different interest groups haven't changed, and we all now about many new possibilities and about the surveillance actually being done and the dangers that the changes brought and can bring.
Other comments here in the other threads are about these more recent issues and the readers should note them too.
- refset 7y agoDuly noted - sorry for diluting attention. Connecting both aspects though: arguably the failure of subsequent technologies to fulfill the decentralized Notes vision has facilitated the rise of extreme centralization and greatly exacerbated our privacy problems.
- jeffrallen 7y agoThis compromise was also used by WebTV in Japan in 1997. I vaguely recall that client/server comms were protected by 56 bit symmetric encryption, and that in international mode, 16 bits of the session key were explicitly sent in cleartext to respect the 40 bit limit. WebTV in the USA was full strength crypto, at least as strong as the little MIPS processor in the settop box could manage.
- nullc 7y agoClaims that weak devices couldn't handle strong cryptography are mostly bogus. Fun fact: The Atari 7800, designed in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games. Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.
- acqq 7y ago> in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games. But not to encrypt the communication -- that would have been, apparently, against the U.S. laws of that time. > Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits. It's surely the "interference" in the form of the mentioned U.S. laws at the time, some other comments here detail the historical background.
- nullc 7y agoI'm not aware of any law it would have been violating if was encrypted in the US. However, export was another matter and the export version of the 7800 left the crypto out! In any case, my point was that weak crypto spanning into the late 90s was not a result of technical limitations.
- acqq 7y ago> I'm not aware of any law it would have been violating if was encrypted in the US. The laws as they were had exactly that effect: a lot of companies didn’t intend to have products sold solely in the US. And it was problematic enough that most companies avoided making a US-only version: even carrying such a product on a floppy disk while travelling outside of US could get you in trouble, see this article from 1995: https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing-investigation-of-phil-zimmermann/ https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing-investigation-o... The companies that did use strong crypto typically had the contracts with the military.