Protocol failure in the escrowed encryption standard

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Protocol failure in the escrowed encryption standard

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Conference on Computer and Communications Security archive
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Computer and communications security table of contents

Fairfax, Virginia, United States

Pages: 59 - 67

Year of Publication: 1994

ISBN:0-89791-732-4

Author

Matt Blaze

AT&T Bell Laboratories

Sponsor

SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 5, Downloads (12 Months): 21, Citation Count: 6

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ABSTRACT

The Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES) defines a US Government family of cryptographic processors, popularly known as “Clipper” chips, intended to protect unclassified government and private-sector communications and data. A basic feature of key setup between pairs of EES processors involves the exchange of a “Law Enforcement Access Field” (LEAF) that contains an encrypted copy of the current session key. The LEAF is intended to facilitate government access to the cleartext of data encrypted under the system. Several aspects of the design of the EES, which employs a classified cipher algorithm and tamper-resistant hardware, attempt to make it infeasible to deploy the system without transmitting the LEAF. We evaluated the publicly released aspects of the EES protocols as well as a prototype version of a PCMCIA-based EES device. This paper outlines various techniques that enable cryptographic communication among EES processors without transmission of the valid LEAF. We identify two classes of techniques. The simplest allow communication only between pairs of “rogue” parties. The second, more complex methods permit rogue applications to take unilateral action to interoperate with legal EES users. We conclude with techniques that could make the fielded EES architecture more robust against these failures.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	DH76	W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman. New directions in cryptography. IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, November 1976.
	Mar93	J. Markoff. Communications plan to balance government access with privacy. New York Times, April 16, 1993.
	NBS77	National Bureau of Standards. Data Encryption Standard, Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 45, Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1977.
	NBS80	National Bureau of Standards. Data Encryption Standard Modes of Operation, Federal Informal.ion Processing Standards Publication 81, Government Printing Ofrice, Washington, D.C., 1980.
	NIST94	National Institute for Standards and Technology. Escrowed Encryption Standard, Federal Information Processing Standards Publicalion 185, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1994.
	NIST94a	National Institute for Standards and Technology. Technical Fact Sheet on Blaze Report and Key Escrow Encryption. June 15, 1994.

CITED BY 6

	Stephen T. Walker , Steven B. Lipner , Carl M. Ellison , David M. Balenson, Commercial key recovery, Communications of the ACM, v.39 n.3, p.41-47, March 1996
	Bruce Schneier , Adam Shostack, Breaking up is hard to do: modeling security threats for smart cards, Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on Smartcard Technology on USENIX Workshop on Smartcard Technology, p.19-19, May 10-11, 1999, Chicago, Illinois
	Charles V. Wright , Lucas Ballard , Fabian Monrose , Gerald M. Masson, Language identification of encrypted VoIP traffic: Alejandra y Roberto or Alice and Bob?, Proceedings of 16th USENIX Security Symposium on USENIX Security Symposium, p.1-12, August 06-10, 2007, Boston, MA
	Mihir Bellare , Shafi Goldwasser, Verifiable partial key escrow, Proceedings of the 4th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, p.78-91, April 01-04, 1997, Zurich, Switzerland
	Ross Anderson , Markus Kuhn, Tamper resistance: a cautionary note, Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Proceedings of the Second USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, p.1-1, November 18-21, 1996, Oakland, California
	Rolf Oppliger , Ruedi Rytz, Does Trusted Computing Remedy Computer Security Problems?, IEEE Security and Privacy, v.3 n.2, p.16-19, March 2005