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Re: NYT on NTT/RSA Chips
jim bell writes:
: At 10:54 AM 6/4/96 GMT, John Young wrote:
: > An executive at NTT America said that although there were
: > no restrictions on the export of cryptographic hardware or
: > software from Japan, his company was still anxious to
: > obtain software from RSA Data to use in its chips. That
: > software is still controlled by United States export law,
: > he said.
:
:
: Maybe it's just me, but the solution to NTT's problem is obvious. Even
: assuming that the export of this software would be against the law, why
: doesn't somebody simply violate that law? RSA would publish that software,
: possibly encrypted with NTT's public key, on a public system protected
: against direct export. "Somebody" would download it, write it to a floppy
: (taking care not to leave any fingerprints, and wetting both the stamp and
: the envelope with tap water, rather than licking them) and mail that floppy
: off to NTT in Japan. (Naturally, you don't put a return address on that
: envelope. The truly paranoid would first take that floppy to some store's
: PC section, and cross-load the data onto a floppy written by some other
: floppy drive.)
:
: NTT finds that envelope in their mail, opens it, reads the floppy, decrypts
: the data, and say, "Wow! It's the data we wanted to get!" It verifies that
: the data is valid by emailing a copy back to RSA in America, who say,
: "Amazing! Somebody has illegally exported our software!"
:
: As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with NTT using this software even
: if it is assumed to have been exported illegally. Obviously, NTT won't
: _ask_ for somebody to do this, because then the government will claim it was
: all a conspiracy, but that doesn't prevent NTT from being the beneficiary of
: somebody else's activities.
I am afraid that that is the solution to the wrong problem. NTT's
problem is that they cannot sell the RSA chip in the United States
without a license from RSA Data under the RSA patent. So the deal is
for RSA Data to be NTT's agent in the U.S. But Bidzos was complaining
bitterly at the EPIC conference that the export regulations on crypto
had cost RSA Data the international market.
The software for both DES and RSA are publically available so it would
not have solved any previously unsolved problem for someone to have
mailed the code--or the algorithms--to NTT.
--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
Internet: [email protected] [email protected]