[44374] in Cypherpunks
Re: nsa and netscape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (david d `zoo' zuhn)
Fri Dec 1 10:56:10 1995
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 1995 09:53:19 -0600
From: zuhn@sctc.com (david d `zoo' zuhn)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com,
BRUEN@mitlns.mit.edu ("Bob Bruen, MIT Lab for Nuclear Science")
// At yesterdays FNC (Federal Networking Council) meeting it was
// mentioned in passing that NSA has given Netscape a grant of $5 Million
// (yes $5M) to beef up the security features of Netscape. More info will
// be forthcoming on this.
This isn't all that surprising. The NSA likes Fortezza, and Netscape has
announced that they will be supporting Fortezza based authentication.
This was first made public in the SSL v3 draft circulated many months ago.
FORTEZZA support is virtually required for any sort of new network
authentication within the US DoD.
The DoD pie is rather large, and I don't blame Netscape for trying to get
a piece of it. One can support FORTEZZA without giving in to GAK for
non-FORTEZZA users.
--
david d `zoo' zuhn --- secure computing corporation
zuhn@sctc.com
