Hi Dounglas,

I should also point out that Belgium apparently has crypto export laws of sufficient complexity to inspire me to look elsewhere when attempting to purchase a hardware encryption board from a Belgian company (uti-maco). Said company also was under the mistaken belief that I needed a US _import_ license; my failed attempts to persuade them otherwise was the final kicker. ------ ------ Douglas Barnes "The tighter you close your fist, Governor Tarkin, cman@communities.com the more systems will slip through your fingers." cman@best.com --Princess Leia

We are selling both uti-maco SafeGuard Systems GmbH and uti-maco Belgium products here in Finland and haven't had any problems with the licences whatsoever. Naturally you have to fill in certain blankets and get the permission but that's same kind of a procedure no matter what European country you would be buing cryptohardware and software. I will forward your message to uti-maco Belgium so that if there has been any misunderstanding they can sort it out. Of course my opinion is biased but uti-maco Belgium is doing top notch crypto libraries and hardware. That intelligent (own processor) cryptoboard which has RSA/DES chips on board is great for any software company wanting to include REAL crypto in their products. Also what makes their implementation especially usefull is the easy and clear API for programmers and that the implementation is scalable to different throughputs without changes in the API. Also the possibility in API calls to decide where a certain operation should be done is a nice feature. So if there is a smartcard connected to a machine all the secret key operations would be done on the SC not with the software. So uti-maco Belgium stuff is one of the best available in Europe. The other big supplier for these things is Crypto AG in Schwitzerland. In Finland there are two companies who might have what you are loogking for, Setec Oy, in Helsinki and Instrumentointi Oy, in Tampere. The latter one at least have a nice encrypting bridge (includes also some routing and filtering capabilities) with a better algorithm than DES (I understood other algrithms would also be available than their own). I don't have the contact information at hand now but let me know if you need it. Best Regards Kari Laine LAN Vision Oy