[Cryptography] Plan to End the Crypto War

[Benjamin Kreuter]

On Sat, 2016-01-09 at 07:35 -0800, Henry Baker wrote:
> At 10:46 AM 1/8/2016, james hughes wrote:
> > Susan Landau says "no legislation requiring exceptional access
> > should be considered unless the particulars of the proposal — the
> > technical particulars — are presented. Otherwise we would be
> > mandating insecurity when what we need is just the opposite." and,
> > contrary to the opinions of many Mathematicians, "technical
> > particulars" do not end at the math.
> 
> The whole point of Chaum's plan is to destroy the appearance of
> unanimity of the crypto community on the infeasibility of these
> "hackdoor" proposals.  It doesn't really matter at this point whether
> the Chaum plan works, just so long as it looks *plausible* to non-
> crypto people.

Except that it needs to look more than plausible to law enforcement, it
needs to convincingly satisfy their requirements.  At a minimum we know
that law enforcement requirements include real-time access and that a
judge should be the arbiter of when that access is granted.  Chaum's
proposal will remove power from judges and the need to form a consensus
among nine parties will preclude any real-time access.

> I'm just cynical enough to suspect some RSA-type funding for Chaum to
> throw this monkeywrench.

Let's not go there.  If we start accusing anyone with a bad idea of
secretly trying to sabotage everything on behalf of the NSA, we are
never going to make any progress.  Everyone in this field has had bad
ideas; the constructive thing to do is to explain to everyone what was
wrong.

-- Ben
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