[Cryptography] On 40-bit encryption

[Tom Mitchell]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Bear <bear at sonic.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 2014-08-20 at 21:49 -0400, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>
> > Oh, but you could check.  Someone form Iran or North Korea trying to
> > download the strong build would be required to set the Evil bit on all
> > their packets.
>
> Actually, I think the crypto export security theatre was probably
> responsible for
>


The tipping point I saw was the asymmetry in the law that permitted
importing into the US
crypto binaries with strong key lengths.  At the same time export was
illegal.  Also printed
books were sheltered by freedom of speech protections so the "secret" was
no longer
a secret and was available to anyone who could type code and debug typos.

There was also a growing trend to have engineering teams in foreign lands
that had no US talent as well as legal frameworks so the crypto bits
never were exported.

So the cat was clearly out of the bag and more troubling to some the talent
pool
was under the control of the other guys.



-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l
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