Government Involving

There are some issues about government involving in cryptography. In fact in some countries there are export restrictions, and in other countries encryption is even illegal. USA and Canada are countries where exporting of software concerning cryptography is illegal and it falls under ITAR regulations. France, Iran and Iraq are countries where encryption is illegal. You can know the legal status of encryption in many countries at: http://cwis.kub.nl/~frw/people/koops/cls2.htm. In the USA there are 2 important organizations: NIST and NSA. NIST stands for National Institute of Standard Technology, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It issues standards for cryptographic routines that it hopes will be adopted by all computer systems in the U.S. (e.g., in 1977 NIST declared DES the official U.S. encryption standard). NSA stands for National Security Agency, and it is a secret agency (its existence was kept secret for many years) of the U.S. government created in 1952 by Harry Truman. The NSA listen and decode all foreign communications of interest to the security of U.S and controls the export of cryptography from the U.S. Developments achieved by NSA are not made public, and there are many rumors - that are never been proved- about the NSA capability to break several cryptosystem like DES and RSA.

Clipper

Clipper is an encryption chip developed by U.S. government as part of the Capstone project. Capstone is a project to develop a publicly available cryptosystem, as authorized by the Computer Security Act (1987). The used encryption algorithm is SKIPJACK, the digital signature algorithm is DSA and the hash function is SHA. All parts of Capstone project have 80 bits long keys. People want secure communications but the law-enforced agencies want to have access to communications between suspected criminals. The Clipper technology attempts to balance these needs by means of escrowed keys. In short, messages are encrypted with a secure algorithm, but the keys involved are kept by one or more third trustworthy parties (currently the NIST and a division of the department of treasury), and made available when authorized by warrant. Fortezza, a PCMCIA card developed by NSA, uses the Capstone algorithms.