Paper Info
Title
Key escrow from a safe distance: looking back at the Clipper Chip
Abstract
In 1993, the US Government proposed a novel (and highly controversial) approach to cryptography, called key escrow. Key escrow cryptosystems used standard symmetric- and public- key ciphers, key management techniques and protocols, but with one added feature: a copy of the current session key, itself encrypted with a key known to the government, was sent at the beginning of every encrypted communication stream. In this way, if a government wiretapper encountered ciphertext produced under a key escrowed cryptosystem, recovering the plaintext would be a simple matter of decrypting the session key with the government's key, regardless of the strength of the underlying cipher algorithms. Key escrow was intended to strike a "balance" between the needs for effective communications security against bad guys on the one hand and the occasional need for the good guys to be able to recover meaningful content from (presumably) legally-authorized wiretaps. It didn't quite work out that way.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2076732.2076777
ACSAC
Keywords
Field
DocType
encrypted communication stream,key management technique,key cipher,key escrow,safe distance,added feature,government wiretapper,session key,us government,clipper chip,current session key,key escrowed cryptosystem,key management,web application security,public key,chip,sandbox
Key distribution,Key generation,Static key,Computer science,Computer security,Clipper chip,Key authentication,Key escrow,Session key,Key (cryptography)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
0
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
matt blaze13189381.70