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Re: export regulationsRe: export regulationsPosted Jan 19, 2005 1:34 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599)In reply to: Re: export regulations by mmarsh Parent article: IBM's patent pledge of course the Commerce Department could change the rules tomorrow. They're the ones who grant the exception, and they have the power to remove it. In principle, they could do the same for all software, not just crypto code. That is, they technically have the same power to restrict exports much more broadly, and they could "grant" such a restriction at any time. (Of course, politically that would be suicide, but the point is that there aren't really any guarantees for any of us...) Greg
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Re: export regulations Posted Jan 19, 2005 1:53 UTC (Wed) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] True, but at present cryptographic algorithms (with keys above a certain length) are controlled by the export regulations, and are only "freely distributable" because of specific license exceptions. It would presumably be more difficult for Commerce to decide that something not yet under export controls should be controlled than to change the rules for something already controlled.
The funny thing is that, as good as RSA with keys lengths above 512 bits is, there are much better techniques for some things that aren't controlled at all. There's no restriction on one-time pads, for one thing, and Shamir's secret sharing is as secure as the length of your message space. As in there's nothing to invert, so you can't even brute-force it.
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