Perhaps you should apply for an export license for your software. I'm sure that the ability to use your system across national borders fits nicely within your marketing strategy. To do so, you simply submit your product to the U.S. National Security Agency, and submit a Commodity Jurisdiction application to the State Department. After the NSA evaluates its security, you'll be able to sell your product overseas. Please see pages 610-618 of Applied Cryptography, Second Edition for general information on the process. By the way, you might note that Cypherpunks is only a mailing list, there is no way to get the signed consent of everyone on the list to agree to anything, much less formal rules of a contest. My suggestion is to post the OTP-expansion algorithm to sci.crypt. It's really in all of our best interests to have the greatest number of people examining your product. Think of the publicity it will generate. Your work will remain protected with whatever patents or copyrights you have applied for. This approach is nothing new, RC2 and RC4 were both posted to sci.crypt. Both are in wider use today because of it. Both algorithms stood up to many people's tight scrutiny. I think your algorithm should be given the chance to do the same. Dan ************************************************************************** Support your local info-calypse dan@milliways.org "The Internet cannot be regulated. It's not that laws aren't relevant, it's that the nation state is not relevant." Nicholas Negroponte, 1996 The Cypherpunks: Civil liberties through complex mathematics. **************************************************************************