Tim Dierks wrote: ... > the fact that the private key, is, in essence, escrowed by the trusted > third party, causes me to believe that this system doesn't fill an > important unmet need.
I'm not sure that's the case! There are some markets out there where there are some contradictory rules. By this I mean, all messages must be private, and all messages must be readable. Now, the challenges that these markets must meet point them in the direction of having a central server doing key escrow. But, the central server is not allowed to escrow the messages or be able to read the messages. A further challenge is that these markets are full off leakages, and so what is needed is a way of taking the crypto capability away from users. This solution seems to do this latter part, in that it achieves the contradictory requirements of making every message unreadable, but crackable, and it - in theory - does not give users any ability to do their own crypto and thus bypass the system. A (purely hypothetical) example, to clarify what this market looks like: Imagine the NSA had to outsource its encrypted comms. They want all messages to be secret because .. that's kind of their mission. But, they are worried about moles in the organisation, so they want to be able to open up the whole shebang somehow and go trolling for data. So how do we rationalise all this? Simple - the people who use the system are not the people who buy the system. The market for this system is not "users" but corporates with special needs. In fact if we look at the website, it's oriented to selling into 4 markets: corporates, financial, health, and government, If we ignore the first as a catchall phrase, the remaining three all have special needs when it comes to privacy. And those needs aren't so much to do with the user as with the organisation. It was for these markets that companies like PGP Inc put in their fabled alternate decryption key, and companies like Hushmail sell "corporate packages." -- iang --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
