3DES key-length

[Mark Janssen]

On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 05:36, Peter Stuge wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 09:27:57PM -0600, Ben Lindstrom wrote:
> > > But, hypothetically, if you wanted to export OpenSSH crypto from the US I'm
> > > sure you'd have all sorts of interesting legal problems, IANAL however.
> > 
> > Don't know.. Sun and IBM seem to pull it off at least.  So there can't be
> > too many glitches.
> 
> They've likely (hopefully) made sure to go through whatever process
> neccessary to be allowed to export strong crypto by US .gov.  I'm guessing
> that it wasn't very simple, however.  Anyway, of course it's _possible_ to
> export crypto also from the US, several companies do this already, however
> since it is most likely quite impractical for any open source organization
> to be bound by whatever US .gov imposes on such export, worldwide
> distribution of open source crypto originates from outside the US.

The Debian project has also received permission to distribute crypto
from the USA, and all the crypto packages that used to be in a seperate
non-us tree (and hosted in .nl) are now incorporated in the debian main
tree (also in the usa).

AFAIK getting permission to distribute strong crypto wasn't too hard,
especially considering that all code is free software/open source. (It's
harder for commercial software).

If interested in the details, look at archives of the debian-legal
mailinglists.

-- 
Mark Janssen <maniac at maniac.nl>
Saiko Internet Technologies