[6607] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Coerced decryption?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Fri Feb 11 14:59:27 2000
Message-ID: <38A4661E.2B047995@algroup.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 19:42:22 +0000
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Russell Nelson wrote:
>
> Caspar Bowden writes:
> > And, as a result, the Bill proposes that the police or the security services
> > should have the power to force someone to hand over decryption keys or the
> > plain text of specified materials, such as e-mails, and jail those who
> > refuse.
>
> Nobody's mentioned the possibility of an encryption system which
> always encrypts two documents simultaneously, with two different keys:
> one to retrieves the first (real) document, and the second one which
> retrieves to the second (innocuous) document.
>
> With such a system, it should be clear that coercing decryption has
> the same negative attributes as coercing self-incrimination.
>
> As an aside, why hasn't anybody mentioned this before? It seems
> obvious to me. Am I some sort of supergenius or something (more
> likely the latter, in my experience!)? Or is there an information
> source that I'm missing out on? Are people saying things about
> cryptography that don't make it to cryptography@c2.net?
Julian Assange has long advocated (and implemented) such things, using
an unknown number of keys, and a certain amount of excess entropy in the
ciphertext, too. His intent, as is yours, is to provide a defence
against coercion.
Cheers,
Ben.
--
SECURE HOSTING AT THE BUNKER! http://www.thebunker.net/hosting.htm
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
Y19100 no-prize winner!
http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=2000/now0121.txt
