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Many other groups have done research and policy work on encryption. Below are some highlights.
RSA is one of the leading makers of strong encryption products.
RSA president Jim Bidzos questions the government's rush to legislate encryption policy without fully examining the consequences in The Encryption Debate: Too Much at Stake to Rush to Legislation.
RSA Labs publishes information on their cryptography research. The RSA Labs FAQ answers a lot of common questions.
RSA Labs is also the sponsor of the RSA challenges mentioned in the introduction to this Policy Spotlight.
The first DES-56 bit challenge fell in four months under the original "DESCHALL" effort.
Since then, the times have dropped rapidly. To compete in the challenges, a group of computer users under the name distributed.net banded together to develop and use software to harness the spare CPU cycles on their computers.
The first distributed.net effort at DES-56 took forty days, then the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Deep Crack" computer took only three days, and in January they both teamed up and solved it in 22 hours and 15 minutes.
EFF's Deep Crack was cracking 88 billion keys per second, with the rest of the distributed.net effort contributing about 160 billion keys per second. At this rate, 40 bits, which has no export restriction, would be cracked in an average of 2 seconds. The government standard of 56 bits would take around 40 hours, and 64 bits would jump to 14 months. 128-bit encrypted data would likely only be decoded by luck. It would take 2.16 x 10^19 years at 250 billion keys per second. (By the way, the universe is probably only 2 x 10^10 years old.)
Another RSA challenge relates to RC5 encryption, which uses a different algorithm than DES and is more difficult to crack using brute-force. The RC5 56-bit challenge took 250 days, while the RC5 64-bit challenge has been going for 16 months and has not yet checked even five percent of the possible keys.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
EFF's John Gilmore has been instrumental in helping to prove the inadequacy of low-grade encryption. He designed and built EFF's Deep Crack It is the first unclassified code-breaking computer. Gilmore was awarded the RSA Award in Public Policy for his work on encryption policy.
EFF maintains a collection of articles on Privacy Policy.
Progress and Freedom Foundation
PFF chairman and former National Security Council member Jay Kenworth co-authored The Computer Revolution and True Threats to National Security (June, 1996) which argues that controls on encryption technology are a greater threat to national security than the use of encryption.
Ira Magaziner gave a speech on Internet policy at PFF's summit in Aspen last summer.
Three recent Issues of the Week have looked at information policy, including encryption:
You can also look in their policy library under Encryption and Privacy.
Last spring, economist and anarcho-capitalist David Friedman taught a class on Computers, Crime and Privacy at Santa Clara Law School.
Friedman has also authored two excellent papers on the need for strong encryption:
Code-Breaking Record Shattered (Jan. 1999) covers distributed.net winning the DES contest.
Down Under and Out of Reach (Jan. 1999) looks at how RSA Australia helps its U.S. parent company bypass export restrictions.
Whitfield Diffie, one of the pioneers of public key encryption, "sat in the Hotseat" in 1996 to discuss the Evolution of Encryption. In RealAudio.
In Welcome to the Freeh World (July, 1996), Brock Meeks discusses the FBI director's testimony before a Senate hearing on key escrow.
Conservative stalwart Phyllis Schlafly has spoken out against the government's restrictions on encryption. Her columns Encryption Is Essential to Freedom (April, 1997), Don't Let Janet Reno Read Our E-mail (Aug. 1997) and Big Brother Is on the Prowl (March, 1998) are available from the Eagle Forum.
The July 1998 Issue of the Phyllis Schlafly Report looks at the White House assault on liberty.
Schlafly's pro-encryption stand has earned her a special mention in Hotwired as a Crypto Defender.
Encryption policy and technology were featured topics in two recent issues of Forbes.
April 21, 1997
September 8, 1997
Fraser is the leading free-market think tank in Canada.
Their 1997 forum The Net is Open For Business looks at the U.S. export policy from an outside perspective.
William Koty authored Electronic Commerce on the Internet (June, 1998) on how critical encryption is to the Internet.
Privacy, Encryption, and Electronic Commerce: Whom Do You Trust? looks at Canadian encryption policy.
Global Internet Liberty Campaign
GLIC provides an excellent International Survey of Encryption Policy. It offers details by country.
Their Crypto Policy page includes a number of links on their campaign to remove encryption policy restrictions from the Wassenaar international treaty.
American Civil Liberties Union
The ACLU offers a Privacy and Encryption page. They attack restrictions on the export of encryption software based on free-speech grounds in a Cyber Liberties Report.
Barry Steinhardt discusses the civil liberties involved in encryption at the 1996 Security and Freedom Through Encryption (SAFE) Forum.
Phil Zimmerman, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy software and chief technology officer of Network Associates, has fought the export restrictions on the front lines for years. Zimmerman's 1996 congressional testimony on those regulations can be found on the NAI Web site.
PGP 6.02 is available for purchase. A freeware version is also available.
Center for Democracy and Technology
CDT's Why Should I Care About the Cryptography Policy Debate? explains the importance of encryption technology in today's world.
The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption (1998) looks at the limitations of the use of these less secure forms of encryption.
An analysis of a recent federal court ruling that called export restrictions unconstitutional is available as part of CDT's litigation database. There is also a discussion of the unresolved issues in the Justice Department's case against Phil Zimmerman.
Electronic Privacy Information Center
EPIC maintains an extensive archive of government documents related to encryption policy:
Other items can be found in EPIC's Cryptography Policy Library.
Encryption Policy Resource Page
The Encryption Policy Resource Page offers a large collection of news articles, papers, and other information, including:
Other groups working on encryption policy:
Other resources:
Anti-encryption resources:
In December 2004 this page was modified significantly from its original form for archiving purposes.
, founded in 1995, is now a part of ISIL.
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