From: grady@btr.BTR.COM (Grady Ward  grady@btr.com)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.privacy,comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: Are DES restriction even logically sound?
Date: 6 Sep 92 17:12:46 GMT
Followup-To: sci.crypt
Organization: BTR Public Access UNIX, MtnView CA. Contact: Customer Service cs@BTR.COM


markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark) writes:
       
   "Supposing I have a complete description of DES in text 
form, and I split it into 8 parts, with file N containing every 8th
character modulo N. I"

[a scheme to evade the U.S. export prohibitions on crypto 
technology]

--------------------


The group would undoubtedly be charged with criminal conspiracy 
in addition to violating the Munitions and Foreign Armaments
act, in addition to whatever other trumped-up charges could be 
applied.  I would guess, looking at the typical punishment 
meted out in the U.S. Code you would be threatened with 20-30 
years in prison and a half-a-million dollar fine, each.  
Consider this the U.S. government's contribution to your 
academic freedom and creative state-of-mind.  :-)

However, take heart, the Internet is already the most immediate 
and powerful voice of free technical international exchange on 
the planet.  Given that the people in all countries linked by 
it are at least as smart on average as U.S. and Canadian crypto 
researchers, and that crypto research in general requires no 
vast infrastructure (unlike the superconducting supercollider,
for example), just sharing our thoughts on sci.crypt and 
international conferences such as EuroCrypt, will soon 
guarantee that the crypto sophistication outside North America 
will surpass that on the inside.

The NSA will slowly become just a poor technical arm of the 
FBI, since only citizens in _this_ country will be stuck with 
crypto/telephony systems that can be broken...

(Stuck on citizens and industry that don't have the technical 
expertise to read and understand sci.crypt, that is. ;-))

For all you crackers out there -- this is a dream manifesto: 
the "official NSA/FBI approved" industrial crypto and digital 
telephony systems will be delayed and use less effective crypto 
systems than available in the E.C. or the Pacific Rim world.  
That undoubtedly will mean there will be holes that can be 
exploited by the crackers, while the cracker _themselves_ can 
use wholly effective cryptographic means picked up at any 
international souk to conspire and pool their computational and 
analytic skills.

What can you do to resolve these issues?

I've already internationally posted DES and RSA source to this 
group; I'm writing a new short article describing a disciplined 
approach to combining conventional crypto systems in a way that 
each "hide" each others canonical weaknesses: a method that I'm 
calling "laminated" cryptography.

By all of us amateurs and private industry professionals 
working as hard as we can to create and disseminate crypto 
information, I hope that we can stimulate the immune systems of 
our FBI/NSA to become innovative on their own and figure out 
how to fulfill their statutory missions without stifling 
cryptographic/information-theoretic research.  But I'm not 
optimistic.

Demanding innovation from any bureaucracy with its built in 
"smoothing function" is always difficult, but with the NSA/FBI 
it is going to be exponentially hard because of the lack of 
effective oversight by the citizens they serve.

I'd have posted this to sci.crypt.politics, but, alas, the 
technical and political issues seem utterly conflated.  :-(


(* Grady Ward Public Key, Mathematica format
338 decimal digit modulus]*)
e=13278340892377147290021581995910566265630745404772050295976\
531169652074968462728692947088224740474086880014187741018\
827679282936360488374332586621372969992125015540674307926\
963403599898215432920593460759568145460543791116449305640\
269575860706334126070662560984930042322363643567821283666\
166102594784564767603179111052467026453547876550953;

n=20601487053579422679033128126836668550296101243048136963408\
859700715907596530150758174233318688216293109628630361192\
968088290065732167528721908401881409490304922316321979613\
722426616580603195157882720031084346896241421285868732184\
267763239722864343244932750154734013576761572454860859591\
356619745333866669144310472787794900107034134707229;
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Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.security,comp.security.misc,local.crypto