Security News > 2020 > January > Remember the Clipper chip? NSA's botched backdoor-for-Feds from 1993 still influences today's encryption debates

More than a quarter century after its introduction, the failed rollout of hardware deliberately backdoored by the NSA is still having an impact on the modern encryption debate.

Known as Clipper, the encryption chipset developed and championed by the US government only lasted a few years, from 1993 to 1996.

In short, Clipper was an effort by the NSA to create a secure encryption system, aimed at telephones and other gear, that could be cracked by investigators if needed.

Some of the people on the Clipper team were so alarmed they secretly briefed opponents of the project, alerting them to insecurities in the design, The Register understands.

Blaze recounted how Clipper was doomed from the start, in part because of a hardware-based approach that was expensive and inconvenient to implement, and because technical vulnerabilities in the encryption and escrow method would be difficult to fix.

News URL

https://go.theregister.co.uk/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/27/clipper_lessons_learned/