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The key escrow debate appears to be
over (and we seem to have won, or
at least the government hasn't
mentioned it lately), but here's
a half-baked solution
to the problem that I
proposed a few years ago.
Split up your key with a "threshold
secret-sharing" scheme that
creates, say, 5000 shares
where
any 500 of them can be
put together to reconstruct
the key. Send one share to each
of 5000 randomly selected
people on the 'net (who presumably
have some kind of server set up for
dealing with this). Don't write
down who you sent the shares to.
If you need to recover your
key, broadcast a message to the
entire world that says "Hey, I
need my key back. Anyone
with shares, please send them to
me". Once 500 of your original
5000 shareholders respond to the
broadcast, you've got your key
back. (Maybe offer a reward
to encourage responses).
The point of all this is that
while anyone can recover a key,
no one can do it *secretly*. Law
enforcement could also get keys
to decrypt suspected criminals'
files, but only in a way that's
open to public scrutiny.
There are a bunch of details needed
to make this work; some of them
were worked out in my
paper at the First
Cambridge Information Hiding
workshop in 1996. I've linked to
it in the links section, below
Oblivious Key Escrow paper
http://www.crypto.c...apers/netescrow.tex My paper on this (Latex format) [mab, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004]
Oblivious Key Escrow paper
http://www.crypto.c...apers/netescrow.pdf same as above in (rather ugly) pdf [mab, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004]
broadcast cryptanalysis
http://www.halfbake...ast%20cryptanalysis Another distributed cryptology idea, posted by "dnm" [mab, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004]
E -- Open Source Distributed Capabilities
http://www.erights.org/ The E toolkit is implimented in Java and has a lot of cool uses. Watch this space. [dnm, Mar 03 2000, last modified Oct 17 2004]
[link]
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This fits right in with some projects I'm working on right now, including electronic rights as capability-based code. I'll see if I can't hack something up soon for everyone to play with. Watch this space. |
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