Key escrowing today

  • Authors:
  • D. E. Denning;M. Smid

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Comput. Sci., Georgetown Univ., Washington, DC;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Communications Magazine
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

The objective of the US Government's Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES) and associated Key Escrow System (KES) is to provide strong security for communications while simultaneously allowing authorized government access to particular communications for law enforcement and national security purposes. The article describes the EES and the KES. Particular emphasis is given to security, since potential users have been concerned that the hooks which provide authorized government access could be exploited or abused. It describes many of the safeguards that have gone into the design of the KES in order to ensure that the risk of unauthorized access to EES-encrypted communications is negligible