From: The Good Folk at The Foundation of Information Policy Research


Just talked to Dirk Weicke, Senior Adviser to Wassenaar Organisation.
(Tel:+43 1 516360)

No written details will be issued until next week, but gist is:

*) No alteration to question of whether Wassenaar covers intangible exports.
Up to signatory states to interpret and legislate.

*) mass-market software, symmetric key length limited to 56-bits

*) software generally available, but with other restrictive tests on
end-user re-configurability, symmetric key length limited to 64-bits

*) Assymetric key lengths (not sure how relates to above) limited to:

RSA & Digital logarithm: 512 bits
Elliptic curve : 112 bits

Ross Anderson adds:


Student exercise of the week: design an email encryption system that,
subject to the above constraints, maximises the cryptanalysis effort.
You may assume that the participants have modern machines (e.g. 133
MHz Pentium and up), and that email messages are typically a few Kb
in length; longer messages may be decrypted offline in batch mode

Ross