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Pretty Good Isn't Good Enough


New Architect: Last time we spoke, you said that privacy in the coming decade would be what the ecology movement was in the '70s. Have recent events changed things?

Phil Zimmermann: That's an interesting question. Much has changed since I said that. Certainly, the need for privacy will become greater because we're seeing a greater erosion of privacy. One disturbing example of this is the Patriot Act, which was passed soon after 9/11. The Act has provisions that I don't even know if the lawmakers read, requiring librarians to turn over information to federal agents about what books people are reading. That's something that was attempted and failed during the Nixon years—the librarians prevailed at that time. Now, the momentum of the events of 9/11 has succeeded in eroding our privacy with regard to books we read in the library. And there are a lot of other examples.

NA: Has the current political climate imperiled PGP's existence? The government tried to kill it before. Could it happen again?

PZ: No. We won the crypto revolution.

NA: Still, crypto hasn't gone mainstream.

PZ: I think that the reason crypto has not achieved greater penetration is because of ease of use. Ideas have been floating around for a couple of years about how to improve that, but they were never funded. Now, there's funding available for renewed engineering efforts at PGP Corporation.

NA: Who's pursuing that at the moment?

PZ: PGP Corporation is. Others are too. Hush Communications has a product called HushMail that's easy to use. There's a company in Belgium called Veridis that is working on products that are easier to use. But probably the most interesting things I know about right now in terms of ease of use are going on at PGP Corp. That will make it easier to penetrate the corporate market.

NA: What about consumers?

PZ: Even there, there are ideas for making crypto easier to use that will be pursued.

NA: Does PGP still have a following in the human rights community?

PZ: Every human rights organization in the world today uses it. In fact, quite a few intelligence agencies around the world use it.

NA: Did the events of 9/11 make you see cryptography any differently?

PZ: Well, we all knew that terrorists could use crypto in general, and PGP in particular. That was part of the core of the debate in the 1990s. I think though that the use of cryptography by criminals and terrorists, particularly al Qaeda, has not been the major stumbling block in U.S. intelligence gathering. As we've seen for the past year as events unfolded and facts came to light, there were so many other issues that posed difficulties for intelligence agencies—in the way they handled their own data—that I just don't think we can lay this at the feet of PGP.

NA: Any thoughts on the reports that AES (Rijndael) and Serpent may have been broken?

PZ: I don't think we can say that they've been broken. There are some interesting mathematical observations that have been made. We have to see how they play out as other researchers pursue them. There's no reason to think that we should stop using either of those two algorithms, certainly they're stronger than anything we had before.

NA: Do you have a favorite algorithm?

PZ: I think AES is a fine algorithm. I also like Twofish. Both are in PGP. I also like CAST, which I've been using for years in PGP. Really, all of the five AES finalists were excellent algorithms, cryptographically speaking.

NA: Are there any technologies on the horizon that pose a potential threat to current key lengths?

PZ: The cryptanalytic techniques that have been discovered usually result in ways you can break these schemes in less time than it takes to exhaust the keyspace. But the keyspace is huge. So what if it takes 2200 steps to break something instead of 2256 steps? That's still a work factor that exceeds all of the computing resources of the universe.

NA: What aspect of technology interests you the most these days?

PZ: There are some exciting things going on in peer-to-peer protocols. Everybody thinks about music piracy, but I think that it's just an intrinsically cool way to do things. It uses the underutilized portions of the Internet, all of the computing power and storage that are in the leaf nodes of the cloud, if I can mix metaphors.


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