Trustworthy contacts

[George Foot]

A cryptosystem common to a  number of nations is impractical unless
those nations are fully integrated politically and have a discipline
which allows a full investigation by any one of them into lapses which
occur in any  other of them  --- a state of intimate political union for
which there is no prospect at the present time ? 

Even for commercial purposes I doubt if a common cryptosystem will
endure and even if the outward form of such a system exists it will be
mistrusted and avoided by discerning people for important traffic of a
sensitive character.  

Already PGP is coming under criticism and its reputation has been
tarnished -- whether this is deserved or not makes no difference.

A dual key system such as RSA is a clever idea providing
considerable advantages when used intelligently in appropriate
circumstances.    

But dual key methods are a technical innovation introduced by
technical people which has lamentably been seized upon by
energetic but shortsighted interests as a basis for a e-commerce
framework which has been enshrined in law before it has been tested
in practice. 

This is a wrong approach as is demonstrated by the difficulties in a
military context (mentioned elsewhere in this list) which have only
resolved by human (as distinct from machine) intervention.

A vast machine for establishing trustworthy contacts will fail.

George


In message <005301c0197c$3156b8e0$fc389fd4@fortytwo>, Brian
Gladman <brg@gladman.plus.com> writes
>From: "Owen Lewis" <oml@eloka.demon.co.uk>
>To: "ukcrypto" <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
>Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 11:56 PM
>Subject: Re: Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios
>
>[snip]
>> > But returning to crypto, there is very little integration of encrypted
>> > communications in NATO since each NATO nation takes a
national approach
>to
>> > cryptographic information protection (guess why).
>>
>> Well, working out from there, and on the basis that allies - most
>> particularly in operations - must sometimes communicate securely,
one is
>> left to conclude that either national systems are used under some
>particular
>> form of arrangement to secure those systems or that must be at
least one
>> allied system or there is some mixture of both approaches
>
>By far the most common approach is to deploy liaison officers. For
example
>US officers with their hands on US kit and US information are
deployed to
>work in the command cells of the other Nations involved.
>
>> > The sharing of sensitive
>> > information between NATO nations is fraught with many
difficulties
>>
>> True. But, surely, only in deciding what may be shared, with whom
it may
>be
>> shared  and, possibly, when
>> it should be shared. The rest is largely mechanics that should
follow on
>> from those decisions. As is common knowledge, in peactime
(including
>> so-called police actions) the NATO national forces remain under
several,
>> national command. In time of war, the national forces declared to
NATO
>come
>> under the NATO command structure, which is almost the only part
of the
>NATO
>> military structure to be maintained in time of peace. Now for that
>structure
>> to prepare adequately for war - and to safely control six figures of
armed
>> men during several weeks of training manoevres, some secure
inter-allied
>> secure communications would seem essential, nicht war?  Can
you imagine
>the
>> potential for chaos, accidental loss of life and even political mistake
if
>> close and secure liaison was impossible?
>
>Yes but the technical means for doing this, except at the top
command
>layers, is via deployed national systems and the exchange of liason
>officers.
>
>These structures work because in the main they involve procedural
and people
>based approaches to information management rather than modern
technical
>ones.  In consequnce they are often inefficient and not very timely
and in
>recent conflicts we have seen some of the products of these
inefficiencies
>in that commercial TV broadcasts have sometimes been a better
source of
>information for the military than their own channels of
communication.
>
>> That statement probably suffers from covering a very wide canvas
in just a
>> few lines.As I'm sure you know, very simple and effective secure
gateways
>> have existed on principles established  for inter-allied working
during
>> WWII - if not as long ago as WWI. The technology has changed but
the
>> principles have remained basically the same. At the other end of
the
>scale,
>> I might agree  that NATO HQ's may not intercommunicate with the
most
>> modern or efficient of secure communications but function,
somehow, they
>> do.
>
>I don't agree here since gateways involving cryptographic
translation
>between a number of different cryptographic domains are essentially
new
>territory for which there are no precedents.  Such gateways require
>cryptograpic capabilities from the nations involved and also need a
level of
>integration into the respective national means of key management.
All the
>nations involved will want to develop and deploy very high
assurance
>'guards' in the various connections to such a gateway and the
gateway itself
>represents a truly horrendous point of vulnerability which makes its
design
>and construction an impossible challenge.  This is a mad way to go
in
>technical terms but that is often what politics demands (as we have
seen
>with RIP).
>
>[snip]
>> It would be nice to think that the design and equipping of a
European
>> Defence Force (or whatever it ends up being called) with secure
>> communications will be an occasion for a fresh start. It could be,
which
>is
>> by no means saying that it will.  If it is, would you say that PK
systems
>> are likely to play a significant role?
>
>Cryptography is still the last bastion of nationalism within the
>government/defence sphere and this makes it difficult to predict
what will
>happen.  I think that politics will dominate and this means that
technical
>logic cannot be used to predict the outcome.  I suspect that a
European
>Defence Force will simply be a repeat of NATO experiences on a
smaller scale
>since I cannot see the major European nations trusting each other's
national
>cryptography.  Paradoxically, as the quality and assurance of
commercial
>cryptographic solutions improves over the coming decade, we might
well find
>that these offer an effective solution for military traffic that requires
>limited or shorter term protection.
>
>    Brian
>
>
>

-- 
George Foot
georgefoot@oxted.demon.co.uk
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/index.html

-- 
George Foot
georgefoot@oxted.demon.co.uk
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/index.html