[Cryptography] Plan to End the Crypto War

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Mon Jan 18 20:47:12 EST 2016


On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 2:59 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill at hallambaker.com
> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 11:35 AM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> >> Not singular "split golden key"  but plural this involves key pairs for
> >> both ends of the conversations.
> >
> > The discussion is slightly interesting, but please notice that it
> > isn't relevant to Chaum's proposed design.  Beating the stuffing out
> > of a propped-up strawman isn't much of a feat of strength.  cMix
> > doesn't have a golden key, it doesn't split that key, etc.
> >
> > It's worth reading Chaum's cMix design to at least *understand* what
> > you may want to criticize.  Try:
> >
> >   https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/008.pdf
>
> Quite.
>
> And moreover, Chaum is first and foremost showing a new technique
> here, applying homomorphic encryption to a particular problem.


Yes,
I may have been distracted but my point is multiple keys are involved
and monitoring traffic over time is hard.  Hard enough that once an
endpoint
is exposed it is unlikely that the insertion into the system will be
relinquished
any time soon.

"Each sender establishes a shared key separately with each of the mix
nodes, which
is used as a seed to a cryptographic pseudorandom number generator to
generate a
sequence of message keys. Each sender encrypts its input"
..."
"Only if all of the mixing nodes cooperate, can the senders and receivers
of messages be linked or identified.




> Chaum's proposal is a useful contribution to that debate insofar as
> the FBI will clearly reject it and so would anyone who might choose to
> use a mix network.
>

 Very much so!

The debate needs to address the venn diagram of small, medium, large and
global
jurisdictions and communication.   As New York looks to ban encrypted
smartphones I should note that some federal agencies just enacted
new policies mandating increased access controls including encryption.

The proposed NY law  http://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/a8093
Not just content on the device but https phone to phone chat
conversations are interesting and other content that is never kept
in a log or record.


-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20160118/39ae5ca2/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list