From: steve-b@access.digex.com (Steve Brinich)
Subject: Re: Dorothy Denning opposes Clipper, Capstone wiretap chips
Organization: Express Access Online Communications, Greenbelt, MD USA
Lines: 13
NNTP-Posting-Host: access.digex.net

 > I believe there is no technical means of ensuring key escrow without the
 >government maintaining a secret of some kind.

  Not necessarily.  For instance, in the system outlined in the May 1993
issue of "Byte", the process of getting one's public key listed for general
use involves giving pieces of your private key to escrow agencies, which
do calculations on those pieces and forward the result to the publishers of
the public key directory, which combines these results into your listed
public key.  If you try to give the escrow agencies pieces which -don't-
yield your private key when they are all put together, the result is that
the public key listed for you is wrong and you can't read messages encrypted
to you.

