From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
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Key escrow
From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
Key escrow
Strong encryption is very difficult to defeat, and this causes a problem for law enforcement and other government agencies who feel that they have a right to access encrypted communications. That's where the concept of key escrow comes into play. Just like a financial escrow account at a bank, the concept of escrow here means that someone is holding something for use by someone else if certain conditions are met. In this case, government officials have proposed key escrow technologies that would provide law enforcement with access to encrypted information. The idea is that government agents would have to obtain a court order before accessing escrowed keys, protecting the privacy of other individuals. While this may be a reasonable goal, there is not yet a reasonable way to implement this approach in a secure manner. Perhaps the most concerted effort to deploy key escrow technology occurred way back in 1993, when the government proposed a technology known as the Clipper chip, shown…