<BLOCKQUOTE><HR>Originally posted by RogueWarrior:
once again, though, i ask you to provide me with examples of situations where the government has gotten involved in something that they didn't eventually regulate.
[/quote]
Hard to do, since things rarely get much press if the government doesnt actually involve itself.
But how bout cryptography. They only regulation theyve done is not permit it as an export. Which makes sense --and theyve eased up on that.
They did take an interest, and all they did was improve standard algorithms. Amazing eh?
<BLOCKQUOTE><HR>From www.rsasecurity.com (http://www.rsasecurity.com)
The NSA exerts influence over commercial cryptography in several ways. NSA serves as an advisor to the Bureau of Export Administration (BXA) at the Commerce Department, which is the front-line agency on export determination. In the past, BXA generally has not approved export of products used for encryption unless the key size is strictly limited. It did, however, approve export of any products used for authentication purposes only, no matter how large the key size, as long as the product cannot be easily converted to be used for encryption. Today the situation is different with dramatically relaxed restrictions on export regulations. The NSA has also blocked encryption methods from being published or patented, citing a national security threat; see [Lan88] for a discussion of this practice.
Additionally, the NSA serves an ``advisory'' role to NIST in the evaluation and selection of official U.S. government computer security standards. In this capacity, it has played a prominent and controversial role in the selection of DES and in the development of the group of standards known as the Capstone project. The NSA can also exert market pressure on U.S. companies to produce (or refrain from producing) cryptographic goods, since the NSA itself is often a large customer of these companies. Examples of NSA-supported goods include Fortezza (see Question 6.2.6), the Defense Messaging System (DMS), and MISSI, the Multilevel Information System Security Initiative.
Cryptography is in the public eye as never before and has become the subject of national public debate. The status of cryptography, and the NSA's role in it, will probably continue to change over the next few years.[/quote]
There ye have it, mainly export policy, which has been relaxed. If you read Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneir, you'll also see that when the NSA has stopped people from patenting algorithms, most of those algorithms had later been shown to exhibit BIG FLAWS.
In DES they did take an interest, and all they did was improve standard algorithms. Amazing eh?
<BLOCKQUOTE><HR>from www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~412/ln/lecture25.html
The 8 S-Boxes are the heart of the DES algorithm. They are tables of substituions. 6-bit input units are replaced with 4-bit outputs. The original S-boxes were the result of 17-person years of analysis by IBM . The goal was to produce a refersable mangling that showed no mathematical relationship to the plaintext or itself. The original S-Boxes were replaced by NSA. Initial speculation was that NSA added a back door. But after much analysis, this appear not to be the case. Perhaps they changed the S-Boxes, because they were afraid that IBM added a trap door. Regardless, it is not believed that the S-Boxes are in any way weak. [/quote]
elsewhere (again applied cryptography) it is argued that the change in S boxes improved the cryptography against a type of attack the public hadnt thought of, differential cryptanalysis.
Here's something that goes along with that
<BLOCKQUOTE><HR>http://www.classes.cs.uchicago.edu/classes/archive/2001/spring/CS552/lect7.txt
People became very suspicious of the NSA. They wondered if they hadn't
built in some sort of trap door with those S-Boxes. IBM checked out the new
S-Boxes and they passed all of IBM's tests. But NBS/NIST certified it--NSA
basically has the world's best cryptographers--and for years people have
been working on ways to break DES. Brute-force attacks have become really
the only effective way to do it with the 56-bit keys that the NSA certified.
But in 1990, Biham and Shamir figured out a new way to attack DES and other
ciphers, a technique called differential cryptanalysis.
Without going into details, this worked great in theory, but for some
reason, DES was extremely resistant to it. How was this possible? This
technique was remarkably effective at cracking other older algortihms. The
reason was that the NSA had already figured out differential cryptanalysis
maybe 20 years before Biham and Shamir did. Remember, from above - the
NSA has the world's best cryptographers. Therefore, the NSA modified the
original S-Boxes to make them more resistant to differential cryptanalysis.
[/quote]
and so it goes...
------------------
<center><IMG SRC="http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~mkomitee/blackhole[3].jpg" border=0></center>
[This message has been edited by Dyslexic Tangent (edited 12-12-2001).]