As part of an ongoing campaign to make Windows NT acceptable for government use, Microsoft Corp has announced plans to support FIPS 140-1 and FORTEZZA, two federal cryptographic standards. In particular, the Redmond giant plans to use FORTEZZA to encrypt web communications using secure sockets layers (SSL) and Windows NT. This might well make NT an easier choice for government procurement officers, but it doesn’t necessarily make the operating system any more secure. FORTEZZA products are based on the National Security Agency’s SkipJack algorithm, which was released for peer review in June. Days later, a team led by Eli Biham of the computer science department at the Israel Institute of Technology found that a variant of the algorithm could be cracked in seconds on a personal computer (CI No 3,452). The team reported that SkipJack does not have a conservative design with a large margin of safety.
