[Cryptography] Chinese Cryptography

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl>wrote:

> It's all stolen from America?
>

They do have an impressive research and teaching program.

But the habit of stealing technology means that it is very hard for their
native talent to find employment at home to do anything other than
reverse-engineer western designs. They are really shooting themselves in
the feet.

Good call though. Wonder if they have their own cyphers. Maybe their
> espionage works well. In that case they can know if the Americans have
> tricks around their own cyphers, and they just use those that can't be
> broken. Or that can be broken, in those special cases.
>

Don't need to wonder, yes they do.

In fact every single WiFi router on the market today has code to implement
a bunch of Chinese ciphers. It is impossible to sell the routers in China
without the code being in the router. But the code does not have to
actually be active. So many (all?) of the routers have code of the form

if (false) { register_Chinese_crypto_suite () }


This is not as daft as it seems. One of the things that China is really
peeved about is having to pay for US patent licenses. They are just as
upset when they have to pay for a legit patent of course but the fact that
many of the patents are obviously spurious and should never have been
issued they see them as being a non tariff trade barrier.

Requiring the use of their own patented technology is a way to repatriate
some of the money to China in a way that makes it easy to ensure that a
good portion of it flows into the pockets of party chiefs or their families.


Graft is a much bigger driver of international diplomacy than most people
believe.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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