RC4 article in Saturday (Sept 17) New York Times

[Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>]

John Markoff has a piece on the RC4 betrayal in the Business section of
the Saturday NY Times (page 37), "A secret computer code is out -- Key
to data security appears on internet".  Not much that hasn't already
been said here or on sci.crypt, but there was an interesting quote from
Jim Bidzos that suggested that one of the conditions RSADSI agreed to
in order to get approval of 40 bit RC4 for export in shrink-wrap software
included keeping the algorithm confidential.  Bidzos speculated that
the NSA could revoke RC4's export status as a result of the
disclosure.

Also, the piece reports that "The RC4 formula was first circulated on
Tuesday to a specialized computer network mailing list of computer
researchers who oppose the Government's stringent controls on data
encryption technology.  The mailing list, which has thousands of
computer users around the world, is known as Cypherpunks, and the
mailings usually consist of highly technical discussions of data
encryption technology."

I guess Markoff gets Eric Blossom's moderated version of the list :-)


-matt