Cryptonomicon.Net - Key Splitting : First (and Second) Person Key Escrow

[Peter Gutmann]

"R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com> quotes:

>One of our missions here at Cryptonomicon.Net is to advocate the use of
>appropriate cryptographic technology. One technology that's sorely missed in
>a number of commercial products is key splitting. Never heard of key
>splitting? That's not surprising. 

It's not surprising because there's no demand for it.  A number of commercial
(crypto hardware) products do it, but only as a backup mechanism / to allow
key migration into new hardware units.  Every vendor has their own techniques
for this, which fit their existing key management mechanisms.  I talked to
some people about doing a standard for this a while back, but given the vast
number of implementation details you'd have to accomodate and the absence of
demand for it, it never went any further than that.

Peter.

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