[914] in Cypherpunks
Re: CryptoStacker, long term vision
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Norman Hardy)
Mon Jun 7 14:06:03 1993
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 93 10:48:50 -0700
From: norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
When the Iranians took over the American Embassy in Teheran they,
acquired access to the machines there. Subsequently there was talk
of computer systems that were guaranteed to be volatile except for
ciphered disks. There would be an unciphered boot block on disk that
did not have the key to the rest of the disk but did have code
to read and decipher the rest of the operating system.
That key, however, would be in a safe place such as Washington DC.
The system could not be booted until
the key was available, presumably thru secure communications.
If you trusted the operating system to only use the key for reading
and writing the disk but not otherwise then pulling the plug made
the all data in the computer inaccessible baring action from
Washington.
