[Cryptography] Does this keying scheme make sense?

[mark seiden]

On 10/21/17 9:37 PM, Jon Callas wrote:
>
>> On Oct 21, 2017, at 7:24 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>
>> I was talking to a guy at a conference who sells a package which,
>> among other things, encrypts files in cloud storage with each file
>> having a different key.  The keys are all generated from a secret
>> keystore seed in a way that is supposed to be secure.
>>
>> I'm looking at his patent on the technique and can't tell whether it's
>> clever, or just overclever:
>>
>> https://patents.google.com/patent/US9703979B1/
>>
> I know this sounds bad, but it does not behoove anyone who is an expert in the field to read someone else's patents. The reason is simple – knowing infringement is triple damages.
>
> I can think of about ten ways to do this securely. If he invented an eleventh, I'd rather just award a golf clap from afar.
>
> 	Jon

(i had to look up "golf clap")

i fell asleep halfway through reading the patent, before they got to the
good part.  (blade runner 2049 caused the same effect.)

but this citation referencing prior art was amusing:

"In some currently available security protocols, including PGP (see Z.
Philip, /PGP Source Code and Internals/. MIT Press, 1995)" [...]

(sure enough, rav google tells me a number of other papers and another
of his patents credit "Z. Philip" with PGP.)

(in fairness, non-chinese have trouble as well distinguishing chinese
surnames from given names).


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