PGP "master keys"

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> Ah -- corporate key escrow.  An overt back door for Little Brother, rather
> than a covert one for Big Brother....

the key escrow meetings attempted to differentiate between keys used for 
authentication and keys used for securing corporate data (I only went to 
a couple of the meetings). the case of key escrow as part of
securing corporate data was similar to business processes for backing up 
corporate data, disaster recovery, and no single point of failure. in 
fact, escrow of authentication keys was equally a violation of business 
standards as not having escrow of encryption keys.

there was cross-over from backup infrastructure and the transition from 
all corporate data residing in hardened datacenters to individual 
desktops ... where the they were finding critical corporate data being 
managed and maintained w/o adequate backup and recovery capabilities.

the point of key escrow as part of infrastructure securing corporate 
data ... was that the data belonged to the corporation ... and loss of 
keys could be equivalent to losing the data ... and as such, was as 
negligent as not backing up critical corporate data and not having a 
disaster/recovery plan.

there was some backup related study that claimed half of the 
corporations that had a disk failure (where the disk was not being 
backed up) containing critical corporate data ... filed for bankruptcy 
withing 30 days of the failure. i assumed that "critical" was stuff like 
account-billable files ... loosing a month worth of customer account 
billing information could create a real dent on the corporation's cash 
flow. one incident involved a corporation that lost something like $50m 
in monthly billings.

it wasn't suppose to be a back door to anything ... anymore than having 
copies of all corporate files on corporate backup tapes (however, the 
corporate backup tapes wouldn't be worth a lot if all the data has been 
secured with encryption ... and the encryption keys are lost).

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