The Arms Export Control Act regulates the exports of defense articles and services to promote world peace and security. Congress authorized the President to designate a list of defense articles to be restricted from export. The U.S. State Department included cryptographic systems, equipment, assemblies, modules integrated circuits, components or software capable of maintaining secrecy or confidentiality of information or information systems as defense articles. This has restricted distribution of dangerous technologies to assure that encryption programs are not available to criminals and governments overseas. The key to a cryptosystem is a specific value that converts the plaintext to ciphertext and allows the ciphertext to be transformed back into plaintext.
Popular techniques depend upon both the sender and receiver having knowledge of the secret key.
This technique is known as secret key or symmetric encryption. A security consideration with this method involves the communication or transfer of the key between sender and recipient. Sender and recipient have both keys. The private key must be kept secret and the public key is publicly known. These keys are related through a mathematical algorithm.