[publish skipjack]
Right now, we're shooting to make the ITARs irrelevant by saying things like 'IDEA is Swiss, and when we can't export it from the US. What does that do to competitiveness?' We can't make that claim about Skipjack. Skipjack is an NSA designed cipher which the agency probably expects will be publicised.
they spent millions of dollars to hide the encryption on the chip-- using state-of-the-art technology from what I understand. it would have been far cheaper not to have done this. also, the chip manufacturer was under very high security. so, seems like exactly the opposite to me-- they don't want it to be publicized. in fact when it was first released there was some verbiage in the documents about how the chip design would be used to prevent such an amazingly powerful algorithm from getting into private hands without "appropriate safeguards". so I don't buy your theory. publishing skipjack would be a very, very significant cpunk victory. recall that DES was slightly redesigned by the NSA, and about 20 years later it was discovered it was done to possibly make it less vulnerable to "differential cryptoanalysis". 20 years later! that suggests that the NSA may be up to 20 years ahead of public/academic crypto research, at least at that point. anyway, my point is that if skipjack was published, similar insights into what the NSA is thinking would be available. can you point to an algorithm other than DES officially sanctioned by NSA? skipjack is even better, it was *built* by them, and apparently to be highly secure. the insights available to private researchers after studying the algorithm would be very significant imho. it would be a snapshot made very recently of what the nsa considers a state-of-the-art encryption algorithm. especially useful considering that DES is about to die and people are looking for alternatives. note that many people suspect Skipjack is very similar to the DES in that it is built out of Sboxes and Pboxes. so in that sense the basic design is probably not all that different. it would be disappointing if it wasn't different from DES in some interesting way. I doubt this would be the case.