Re: Belgium has 'key escrow' law

[Kari Laine <buster@klaine.pp.fi>]

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