Clipper Chip definition of Clipper Chip in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

CLIPPER chip

A cryptography chip used by the U.S. government for telephone security that used the SkipJack algorithm and provided for key escrow. The federal government tried to make CLIPPER a universal method, because it alone could unscramble the data if required using independently-stored fragments of the Law-Enforcement Access Field (LEAF), which could be reassembled into a decryption key. The CLIPPER chip also included the CAPSTONE chip, which provided the actual cryptographic processing.

The proposal failed because of widespread rejection by the cryptographic community, which pointed out that nothing would preclude encrypting telephone transmissions with some other method before using a CLIPPER-chip equipped telephone unit. See Skipjack algorithm.

Clipper Chip

′klip·ər ‚chip

(computer science)

A chip proposed by the United States government to be used in all devices that might use encryption, such as computers and communications devices, for which the government would have at least some access or control over the decryption key for purposes of surveillance.

even wanted to bring back the Clipper Chip," an anti-encryption standard that would have let the feds read any e-mail and snoop on other scrambled communications.

Patriot games: Protecting Civil Liberties. (Citings) by Doherty, Brian / Reason

Bidzos said that NTT's chips, which have been developed and manufactured by a subsidiary, NTT Electronic Labs, were far more powerful than the so-called Clipper chip, a data-scrambling system that the Clinton administration proposed for the nation's telephone system.

ENCRYPTION CHIP SIDESTEPS U.S. EXPORT CONTROLS by Daily News (Los Angeles, CA)

The Clipper and Capstone chips also represent only one possible approach to achieving a reasonable balance between unconstrained privacy and the needs of law enforcement and national security, Silvio Micali of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has proposed an alternative scheme - developed well before the Clipper chip announcement - that eschews complicated chips and special hardware in favor of a considerably more flexible, inexpensive software solution.

Encrypting controversy: a fierce debate erupts over cryptography and ... by Peterson, Ivars / Science News

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