Scientist Finds Flaw in Touted ‘Clipper Chip’

A computer scientist has discovered a basic flaw in coding technology that the Clinton Administration has been promoting as a standard for electronic communications, a newspaper reported today.

Matthew Blaze, a researcher at AT&T; Bell Laboratories, told the New York Times his research had shown that someone with sufficient computer skills can beat the government’s technology by encoding messages so that no one, not even the government, can crack them.

The Administration has been urging private industry to adopt the “Clipper chip” as a standard encoding system. The government says telephone and computer messages sent with the chip cannot be read by an outsider but can be decoded by government law-enforcement agencies.

Blaze said the flaw he discovered in the Clipper design would not permit a third party to break a coded computer conversation. But it would enable two people to have a secret conversation that law enforcement could not unscramble.