Re: NSA, ITAR, NCSA and plug-in hooks.

>are specifically designed for the insertion of cryptographic materials, 
>or is it the fact that they could be used to support cryptographic 
>enhancements?

Everything is decided on a case-by-case basis.  I was in a meeting
with some NSA export-control people (Dept Z03) and asked a few questions
on this topic trying to nail down the angle of this slipper slope.

Basically, generic buffer-manipulation is okay.  "Keyed compression"
where you explicitly passed something called a key to a DLL routine
would be looked on suspiciously.  An abstract set of open/modify/close
routines (where open returned a pointer to opaque state, say a session
key :) would be fine.  The technical guy quickly grasped that I was
talking about anonymous remailers, but they "conceded" there's nothing
they can do about it.

I say "concede" because that implies more political/control-issues
then were really present at the meeting.
	/r$

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Hello Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>
  and rsalz@osf.org, ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu
  and cypherpunks@toad.com, owner-cypherpunks@toad.com,
  and s1113645@tesla.cc.uottawa.ca

...
> >are specifically designed for the insertion of cryptographic materials, 
> >or is it the fact that they could be used to support cryptographic 
...
> Basically, generic buffer-manipulation is okay.  "Keyed compression"
> where you explicitly passed something called a key to a DLL routine
> would be looked on suspiciously.
...

Why would you call it a key?

How about compression "options"? The compression algorithm could
have a "speed" mode and a "size" mode. It could also have options
for file type etc...

Recipient id could be passed along to check which compression
method the recipient knows.

...
> An abstract set of open/modify/close
> routines (where open returned a pointer to opaque state, say a session
> key :) would be fine.
...

So what's the difference... apart from what it's called?


Jiri
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