Paulina Borsook
How will information sent over the data superhighway be kept safe and secure, ensuring privacy for individuals and commercial operators? This question is far from resolved, and it has provoked heated controversy about encryption regulations.
Data encryption is vital because it's the only way to ensure that data is kept strictly private--especially as communication shifts more and more to wireless pathways. Other security measures, such as requiring passwords or physically restricting access to a network, are less reliable. According to Stephen Crocker, vice president at Trusted Information Systems (Glenwood, MD) and Internet area director for security, encryption implemented in hardware will be able to keep up perfectly well with gigabit speeds, but hardware
implementations may prove too costly in component prices, space, or power consumption for inexpensive consumer devices such as set-top boxes or cellular phones. On the other hand, software encryption may not be able to keep up with very high-speed applications.
At the level of technology, how to use encryption routinely has not been worked out. Yet it's essential: To feel comfortable using the data highway, consumers must be sure that information about their tastes and habits is kept private unless they authorize its release. Crocker points out that while DES, the most common U.S. encryption technology, has been recertified by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) for another five years, increasingly powerful computers may soon "have enough brute force to break yesterday's code," meaning the years-old DES technology.
More secure schemes exist, and this has led to a new kink to the encryption debate: how law enforcement agencies should deal with virtually uncrackable new public-ke
y and compound encryption techniques, such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). These schemes can protect people from malicious industrial competitors--or stymie law-enforcement agencies on the trail of a criminal money-laundering scheme.
The Clipper chip proposed by the U.S. government largely for telephone-based communications uses an encryption technology that provides a "back door" accessible to government agencies authorized for a wiretap. The proposal has been met with a storm of legal and technological controversy, although the government has said it is considering alternatives.
Despite Clipper, "it's not a big trick for criminals to encrypt conversations," says Crocker; they can, for instance, obtain foreign DES products. So unless the U.S. government makes Clipper mandatory on all telecommunications gear and, in Crocker's words, "outlaws stray cryptography"--two actions it has repeatedly said it will not take--there is no reason society's bad elements would use products that give law enforceme
nt a means to entrap them.
San Francisco-based writer Paulina Borsook wrote about security in the May 1993 issue of BYTE. She can be reached on the Internet as
loris@well.sf.ca.us
or on BIX c/o "editors."
Highway Safety: The Key Is Encryption
