[109611] in Cypherpunks
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mixmaster)
Tue Mar 30 22:19:55 1999
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:18:03 -0800 (PST)
From: Mixmaster <mixmaster@remail.obscura.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Mixmaster <mixmaster@remail.obscura.com>
Monday, March 29, 1999 - 17:51:54 MET
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00145/bibs/12n2p117.html
Translucent Cryptography - An Alternative to Key Escrow, and Its Implementation via Fractional Oblivious
Transfer
Mihir Bellare, Ronald L. Rivest
Translucent Cryptography - An Alternative to Key Escrow, and Its Implementation via Fractional Oblivious
Transfer
Mihir Bellare, Ronald L. Rivest
Subscribers may view full text in PDF from web page
Abstract
We present an alternative to the controversial ``key-escrow'' techniques for enabling law enforcement and national security access to encrypted
communications. Our proposal allows such access with probability p for each message, for a parameter p between 0 and 1 to be chosen (say, by
Congress) to provide an appropriate balance between concerns for individual privacy, on the one hand, and the need for such access by law
enforcement and national security, on the other. (For example, with p=0.4 , a law-enforcement agency conducting an authorized wiretap which
records 100 encrypted conversations would expect to be able to decrypt (approximately) 40 of these conversations; the agency would not be able to
decrypt the remaining 60 conversations at all.) Our scheme is remarkably simple to implement, as it requires no prior escrowing of keys.
