Laws Outside the U.S.

[Ian Farquhar]

On Sep 21,  1:08pm, Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> - Encryption soft/hardware can not be exported to communist countries
>   (COCOM) without problems. I don't know exactly, whether it is
>   forbidden, must be licensed, or must be registered in any way.

This had an interesting side-effect in the GSM specifications, as there was
a lot of dispute about how secure GSM should be.  As West Germany (as it was
then) had a lot of borders with the Eastern Bloc, they wanted very
strong crypto.  France wanted very weak crypto.  Considering the players
involved, you can imagine the rest.

A5 ended up being based on a French design, so I think we can draw the
obvious conclusions.  Although I have been told that the A5 implementation
available on the network bears little relation to the final one
released in GSM, I believe that the current feeling is that it has
a key entropy of 40 bits maximum, if that.

							Ian.