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Re: Rest of World encryption hardware products?
At 11:48 AM 6/9/98 -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
>> > Since it is not possible to ship worth-while encryption products
>> >from the US (40-bit restriction),
>>
>> Actually that is not true anymore. TriStrata Security just announced
>> a fully exportable, unlimited key strength encryption product. Here's
>> their URL.
>>
>> http://www.tristrata.com
>
>I read the whitepaper on the site. It contains a number of phrases
>which should set off any crypto expert's snake-oil detectors, the most
>crucial being "virtual one time pad".
>
I don't think you need to take quotes out of context and change
their wording. Here's exactly what was written.
"With RKS, a Random KeyStream derived from a physical random
number generator is used as the cipher key. Conforming to the
requirements for a practical Vernam Cipher, the Random KeyStream
is the same length as the message and will not repeat with a
small statistical probability. The secret is the effective
management of a virtual keystream over 10³º bytes long."
It is not claiming to be perfect, there is a small statistical
probability of a repetition. Obviously you can't store a 10^30
byte 1-time pad. So it has to be generated from a smaller
amount of random data. However the solution is elegant and
has been reviewed by some top cryptographers, like Bart Preneel
and Fred Piper. So far it has held up under tough analysis,
including by some cryptographers over at Bell Labs. It's
effective key strength is 128 bits.
>It also has built-in key recovery, and appears to require interaction
>with a centralized network service for all encryption and decryption.
>As described, it also has good potential to have severe scaling
>problems.
>
The built in key recovery is why the unrestricted export license was
granted. No keys are escrowed with the government or third party
agencies (unlike TIS's solution). This is very powerful stuff. Any
company in the world, except for places like Iraq, can buy the system
and keep their keys to themselves. Key recovery is at their own
discretion, not forced upon them by the US government.
As for scaling, I guess if you can exceed 2 thousand requests per server
per second, then you've got a problem. It ships as a dual server
system. This sure beats the hell out of Public Key implementations
which can't do more than 10 per sec.
- Alex
--
Alex Alten
Andrade@Netcom.Com
P.O. Box 11406
Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA
(510) 417-0159
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