Strong cryptography: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:36, 25 June 2023

Revision as of 22:37, 25 June 2023

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* military items (designated as "munitions", although in practice the items on the [[United States Munitions List]] do not match the common meaning of this word). The export of munitions is controlled ty the [[Department of State]]. The restrictions for the munitions are very tight, with individual export licenses specifying the product and the actual customer;

* [[dual-use]] items ("commodities") need to be commercially available without excessive paperwork, so, depending on the destination, broad permissions can be granted for sales to civilian customers. The licensing for the dual-use items is provided by the [[Department of Commerce]]. The process of moving an item form the munition list to commodity status is handled by the Department of State.

Since the original applications of the cryptography were almost exclusively military, it was placed on the munitions list. With the growth of the civilian uses, the dual-use cryptography was defined by [[cryptographic strength]], with the strong encryption remaining a munition in a similar way to the guns ([[small arms]] are dual-use while artillery is of purely military value).{{sfn|Diffie|Landau|2007|p=728}} This classification had its obvious drawbacks: a major bank is arguably just as systemically important as a military installation{{sfn|Diffie|Landau|2007|p=728}}, and restriction on publishing the strong cryptography code run against the [[First Amendment]], so after experimenting in 1993 with [[Clipper (cipher)|Clipper]], a security algorithm where the US government kept special decryption keys in [[escrow]], in 1996 almost all cryptographic items were transferred to the Department of Commerce.{{sfn|Diffie|Landau|2007|p=730}}

=== Russia ===