The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as an encryption device that secured "voice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor that was intended to "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions." It was intended to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission. Introduced in 1993, it was entirely defunct by 1996.
Key escrow
The Clipper chip used a data encryption algorithm called Skipjack to transmit information and the Diffie–Hellman key exchange-algorithm to distribute the public keys between peers. Skipjack was invented by the National Security Agency of the U.S. Government; this algorithm was initially classified SECRET, which prevented it from being subjected to peer review from the encryption research community. The government did state that it used an 80-bit key, that the algorithm was symmetric, and that it was similar to the DES algorithm. The Skipjack algorithm was declassified and published by the NSA on June 24, 1998. The initial cost of the chips...
vorlon
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