John Markoff has a piece on the RC4 betrayal in the Business section of the Saturday NY Times (page 37), "A secret computer code is out -- Key to data security appears on internet". Not much that hasn't already been said here or on sci.crypt, but there was an interesting quote from Jim Bidzos that suggested that one of the conditions RSADSI agreed to in order to get approval of 40 bit RC4 for export in shrink-wrap software included keeping the algorithm confidential. Bidzos speculated that the NSA could revoke RC4's export status as a result of the disclosure. Also, the piece reports that "The RC4 formula was first circulated on Tuesday to a specialized computer network mailing list of computer researchers who oppose the Government's stringent controls on data encryption technology. The mailing list, which has thousands of computer users around the world, is known as Cypherpunks, and the mailings usually consist of highly technical discussions of data encryption technology." I guess Markoff gets Eric Blossom's moderated version of the list :-) -matt