--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 19:11:37 -0500 To: jehill@nexis.org From: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net> Subject: Re: Triple DES "standard"? Cc: Rodney Thayer <rodney@tillerman.nu>, Cryptography@C2.net Sender: owner-coderpunks@toad.com Rodney Thayer reported:

...

Curiously enough, there seem to be no references to a standard before the X9.52 effort, which appears to be only a year or two old. NIST calls Triple DES a "private" standard.

Josh Hill <jehill@nexis.org> responded variously:

?

Before things become standards, they are just good ideas. Triple DES is widely used, despite the fact that there is no absolute standard. The draft standard, itself, is actually quite straight forward... Nothing really interesting about it, aside from ANSI's blessing.

NIST does the "we'll just refer to another standard and call it ours" thing a fair bit... Look at FIPS 186-1: The RSA signature scheme accepted is the one specified in ANSI X9.31.

Actually, as I recall the tale, the Amercian Bankers Association-sponsored ANSI-accredited X.9 Committee's blessing of DES3 was itself pretty interesting. I understood that the NSA lobbied bitterly against the X9 effort to standardize 3DES as an ANSI standard, insisting that DES would surfice until its successor was chosen. A couple years ago, when the X9 committee -- or maybe one of the X9 crypto subcommittees -- rejected that advice and initially recommended that 3DES be made a standard, I was told that the NSA rep angrily declared that 3DES would _never_ get an export license and would never be shipped overseas. (Which may have put a damper on the 3DES standardization effort;-) Unfortunately, these standards development efforts usually escape the media's attention. Anyone on the list active in X9 and can give us the real story? Since the birth of X9 in the late 70s, the US National Security Agency has its own representative on the X9 Committee. As one might expect, the NSA has traditionally had significant influence over the ANSI "F" (crypto) subcommittees and cryptographic standards in financial services. There was a time when Ft. Meade effectively dictated those standards. Now, that is not necessarily so.... (After the NSA blundered so badly in trying to force the Banking industry to switch from DES to CCEP/Clipper in the late 80s, the Agency's mesmerizing control broken. The initial intro of CCEP/Clipper -- at an ABA meeting -- proposed that only US owned institutions could have access to Clipper. At the time, as I recall, maybe 10-15 percent of the US banks were foreign owned;-) The bankers couldn't believe that these idiots -- obviously so ignorant about the workings of the industry they were trying to defacto regulate -- were from the NSA of Legend and Lore.) I always felt that the NSA's alienation of the Bankers was probably the single most important factor in the collapse of the government's Cipper campaign. Suerte, _Vin ----- Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548 -- <@><@> -- --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'