Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
that virtually all of the other democratic, industrial nations have few if
any controls on the use of cryptography. The position may be explained,
in part, by the dominant role that state security agencies in the U.S. hold
in the development of encryption policy.”
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Collaborators
A few cryptographers sought more conciliatory positions, most famously
Dorothy Denning, then a professor of computer science at Georgetown.
Denning saw crypto anarchy as a undesirable threat, arguing “Our informa-
tion superways require responsible conduct just as our interstate highways
require. Key escrow encryption has emerged as one approach that can meet
the confidentiality and data recovery needs of organizations while allowing
authorized government access to fight terrorism and crime.”
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Silvio Micali, a colleague of Ron Rivest in the theoretical computer
science group at MIT, also felt there was room for compromise between
the ability to protect one's conversations and the legitimate needs of law
enforcement. Arguing that cryptographic technologies could in fact provide
the means to satisfy both camps, he proposed the concept of
fair crypto-
systems
, in which the power of law enforcement is mitigated by the split
of the private key into two parts, with one part recoverable solely in coop-
eration with a trusted third party. His paper began with a lengthy exposé
on the merits of a conciliatory approach:
There is a legitimate concern that wide-spread use of public-key cryptography may
be a big boost for criminal and terrorist organizations. Indeed, many bills propose
that a proper governmental agency, under the circumstances allowed by the law, be
able to obtain the clear text of any communication over a public network. . . . It is
not surprising that such alternatives have legitimately alarmed many concerned
citizens, generating the feeling that privacy should come before national security
and law enforcement.
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Micali's solution consisted in splitting the secret key into a number of
shares to be entrusted to independent trustees (i.e., “federal judges, Con-
gress . . . a civil rights group”). In the event of a court order, the shares
could be united to reconstruct the private key and thus decrypt encrypted
communications. The idea was, in Micali's word, to improve “the security
of the existing communication systems, while
keeping the legal procedures
already holding and accepted by the society.”
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Micali argued that fair
cryptosystems were, in fact, “close in spirit to Democracy itself, in that
