Russia Intercepts US Military Communications?

[Adam Shostack]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 01:17:43PM -0500, Peter Wayner wrote:
| He went on to talk about "crypto" as if it was something like fuel or 
| food. He said, "They probably loaded up 4 or 5 days of crypto at the 
| beginning, but then they had to turn it off after the supply lines 
| got muddled."
| 
| So this would be consistent with some key management structures but 
| not with others. If you give a unit a good random number source and 
| diffie-hellman, they should be able to go the entire war without 
| running out of "crypto." But I don't know if the US military embraces 
| the kind of hierarchy-free key management imagined by cypherpunks.

Heh.  They certainly tend not to.  And really, when you have a
hierarchy, you may not even want to.  The ease of jumping into an
encrypted net with a MITM attack would be pretty scary, or everyone
needs copies of a few dozen to thousands of authentication keys, which
is going to be tricky.

(Of course, if they just put the crypto on smartcards, or key fobs,
you could likely carry a month or three worth of crypto with you, but
then they wouldn't know what had happened to every key out there.
Clearly, its better to have unencrypted comms where you know they're
insecure, rather than low assurance secure comms.  For some threat
models that I disagree with, anyway.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume



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