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China Walks Out of Wireless LAN Security Talks
Ant writes "A CommsDesign article reports that China walked out of a wireless standards meeting this week, accusing the International Organization for Standardization of favoring the IEEE's 802.11i ANSI-certified wireless LAN security scheme over its own controverisal proposal, EE Times has learned.
The gambit came after China's Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) security scheme was withdrawn and placed on a slower track by the ISO." From the article: "China initially agreed last year to refrain from making its WAPI security scheme mandatory for wireless LAN equipment in China. It then approached ISO with a fast-track submission in an effort to make WAPI an international security standard."
This really isn't China's fault. I used to do this kind of thing too when I was playing marbles around the age of 4. If things didn't go my way, I'd round up all my marbles and stomp off on my way home.
I'm a big tall mofo.
According to this rant WAPI is "on old technology, performs poorly and is insecure"
the Chinese?
Seriously. Does China have a valid complaint or not? No one knows yet. Until then, there's nothing to report.
Remember, China still has a repressive few who are determined to remain in power and if strangling wireless LAN in their own country helps them stay in power one more day, so much the better for them. Not much of a difference between them and the old emperors and such, just exert power differently...
"We get signal!"
"No you don't, and off to reeducation camp for you!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...but an hour later, they were hungry for meeting again.
Repeat after me... WAPI is Crappy.
WAPI is insecure, doesn't scale, late and undeployable.
If you read the specs and had any involvement in the 802.11i process, you will understand what an amature piece of work WAPI is. It was compounded with the blatant IP grab that China was trying to make with WAPI (you have to send China your RTL, they *THEY* can integrate it into your chip - yeah right).
The only way you can effectively write 802.11 specifications for anything as intertwined with the base spec is to go to the 802 meetings and propose your scheme. From 802, down through 802.11 and the 802.11 task groups, the documents are heavily cross dependent and part of the purpose of these massive meetings is to make sure that all the bits fit together and are kept up to date with respect to each other.
Trying to write an 802.11i replacement in isolation is doomed to failure and fail is exactly what they did.
Now they are forum shopping. ISO rubber stamps the 802 documents because 802 has a long history of succesful open standards development. Whining 'it's not fair! They won't take our spec but they will take the IEEE specs' is disingenuous bullshit and they know it. There is a basic quality threshold you have to pass first.
Evil people are out to get you.
Isn't that sort of oxymoronic? In a communist country how does one fit "privacy" and/or "secure" encryption? This is obviously for public use. The government can adopt whatever security standards they dam please for their own communications.
Perhaps China (or at least as personified by these officials) has forgotten where a lot of electronic equipment is manufactured.
Many of the chips in question are manufactured in Taiwan by TSMC. I guess some of them could be made in China at UMC.
Why not just take the new standard and profit on our willingness to buy their stuff, as usual?
Because chip manufacturers have no influence over the designers of Wi-Fi chips, which are mostly American companies (Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Intel, etc.). So it's not really their stuff.
they are growing... which is great for a communist country to do... if im not mistaken other than cold war russia and germany... they would probably be the first sucessful communist government to succeed in producing a government with a stable economy. its true that textiles are comming from china ( which by the way has closed a lot of factories here in columbus, ga and lost many people there jobs..but thats another story) but its hard to push your standard if the rest of the world is not using it. they could push all day long ...other companies will go with the flow and follow ISO standards ( big companies like Cisco/Linksys and others) it would make sense for China to discuss why they feel their standard is better instead of stroming out... you cant act like the 800 lbs gorrilla until you weigh 800 lbs? but you bring alot of good points to the table
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!
It seems that China wants to capitalize on the fact that they are considered a big potential market by the West. If they are insignificant, who would care if they want to use WAPI? It is greed by Western companies that have allowed China to do this--"hey, if I don't give in, some other company will and I cannot afford to lose potential market share in a country like China". The fact that they went to the ISO to give WAPI a fast-track course on standardization says out loud that as soon as WAPI is standardized, China will require WAPI.
You overlook the fact that if China meddles in international business to the degree of requiring them by fiat to adopt something, the likely result is a lot of companies deciding that maybe Thailand of Vietnam don't look so bad after all.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Is China some communications company I've never heard of? Or is the government in talks with the ISO board?
As lighthearted as your comment is... that's the scary part of all this. I imagine it terrifies the large communcations and networking firms.
The catch-22 that so many vendors are facing is to not participate in such a huge market (bad idea) or be forced to partner with a company in China to produce the product locally for China [because WAPI won't be licensed to foreign firms] (also a bad idea). It's worse than a prisoner's dilemma, because you already KNOW that Huawei and others will provide equipment that is "legal" in China... so the ability to "win" by refusing to play (both prisoners remaining silent) is not dependent on your competitors. It is - precisely - zero. Refusing to enter the Chinese market also reduces competition and price pressure in China, allowing local firms an even better base with which to compete with firms in the US and EU.
This just stinks, in my opinion. It goes right along with China selecting the EVD standard for DVDs. It's playing a market power game... and while it's effective (and just might work in this case), it doesn't make the 'game' any less dangerous for US and EU firms.
From the paper:
"The only secret part of the protocol is the symmetric encryption algorithm used between a wireless device and the access point, after both of them have been authenticated." and "The regulation also requires that any company who develops products that use encryption to keep the encryption algorithm a secret from anyone who is not authorized to know the algorithm"
To have a secret algorithm is a bit untrustworthy!
Would you trust your secrets to a secret Chinese algorithm? It might be good but clearly the Chinese can break it.
"All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
There is no Global body that makes laws!
There is no international legislature (the UN ain't it), there is no international monarch. They are the two groups that make laws. When there is a 1:1 correlation between cause & effect, if you don't have the cause (international legislature) you can't have the effect (international law).
So despite the lies that a bandied about, international law doesn't exist.
What people often mean when they say "international law" is "treaties," but they usually have some agenda they are hiding behind and intentionally misleading you. I assume that since God is dead and humans can no longer appeal to the moral authority of God that they feel the need to appeal the moral authority of some other fictitious being. In this case, international law (aka global standards).
Now on to treaties.
Treaties are just agreements between governments to enact laws. They aren't law by themselves. The US Constitution gives the President the authority to make treaties, but Congress gets to ratify and then make laws based upon them.
So, the US & AU make a treaty to do W, X & Y
When it gets run through the AU Parliament they don't like W. So they pass a law that allows for V, X & Y. That law is only enforceable in AU. It is an imperfect implementation of the treaty, but an implementation nonetheless. It is like a standard that is implemented but not fully.
Same thing happens in the US Congress. But they pass law with X, Y & Z.
Now you have 2 national laws. A AU law. A US law. You don't have an international law. Why? No international legislature remember.
You can sue in AU under the AU law, but not the US law. So in AU you are entitled to V, X & Y.
You can sue in US under the US law, but not the AU law. So in US you are entitled to Z, X & Y.
No where can you sue under the treaty. You never are entitled to W. Because te treaty (which entitled you to W) isn't a law, just an agreement to make a law.
You can't sue in NZ under either the AU or US laws. Because NZ, has neither of these laws and their courts don't care about US or AU laws.
Now we mis-use the term "treaty" to refer to both the AU & US laws collectively, but neither of them is really the treaty as negotiated by the PM/President.
Hey what about these international courts?
Well, they are really arbitration bodies.
They have no legal power beyond what the individual nations give them.
The UK may pass a law giving ICC judgments full effect, but that is due to the UK ceding sovereignty to the ICC, not because the ICC is inherently morally superior or because of some international law (which doesn't exist remember).
Now the US doesn't agree to cede its sovereignty to the ICC. So the ICC has no effect in the US.
Why no power beyond what the individual nations give them?
It comes down to a concept called jurisdiction.
See, ultimately might does make right. Not moral correctness, but the right to do something is ultimately based upon your ability to enforce that right.
To enforce a court order to, for example, the ability to forcibly imprison someone, take their personal and real property from them, you need an army and a police system. Nations have these things. NGO bodies don't. Even the UN has no standing military. It relies on borrowing the military of its member nations.
If the ICC has a judgement it wants enforced in the UK, it needs to get the approval of the UK government to use the UK police force to do that. Alone, the ICC is impotent.
Ultimately, every country acts unilaterally. Every country implements their own version of treaties. Every country decides whether or not to cede sovereignty to an international arbitration board.
"is that Communist ideals, always and everywhere, fail in practice"
Like most unfounded generalizations, thats not really true.
They only thing thats failed recently was Stalinism which was really the only thing resembling Communism that was tried on a large scale in the last century and it was really more Authoritarian Socialism. Trotsky advocated a substantially more democratic form of communism, abhorred Stalin's repressive tendencies, but lost a power struggle and his life. If Trotsky had won, the last century would have been a much different place. All that was proved in China and Russia in the last century is that dictators can be ruthless and brutal, both Stalin and Mao were, but so were Hitler, and Mussolini, Pinochet and the Shah of Iran...this list goes on for a while so for brevity I'll stop here.
Before humankind developed agriculture and started economies man lived under "primitive communism". It worked quite well and was substantially less devastating to our planet than capitalism has proven to be. It was the social form most native american tribes practiced and worked quite well until it encountered imperialist capitalism.
A few other examples of communism that doesn't really fit your mold were the earliest Christians which is somewhat ironic. They did in many instances live in communes and if you actually read Christ's teaching without bias he is in most instances advocating Communism and abandonment of personal property. Some community's like the Amish and Mennonite's live in communes today for this reason, its the closest economic model to the teachings of Christ. Their communes aren't perfect but many work quite well. The problem with modern Christian's are most of them like their wealth and property so they turn a blind eye to Christ's teachings on the subject.
Its a little hard to quantify what system China runs under these days but it appears to mostly be a Stalinist dictatorship with a mix of capitalist economics though its economy is so heavily controlled by the government it recently resembles Fascism more than Communism or Capitalism. China does present a problem with your generalization because it was for a very long time Stalinist Communism and its Communist party is still very much intact and now very successful though I grant you its sure not pure communism anymore.
Cuba certainly isn't perfect but it does get by and it has a few things over the U.S. In particular, quality health care for everyone, not just those who can afford it like in the U.S., and higher education for everyone based on merit and not based on who can afford it. Its certainly not a wealthy country but it does get buy which is amazing considering it has to endure economic boycott from its largest neighbor and has been under various forms of attack from the U.S. since its inception.
I'll probably get flamed for it but Gates and Balmer were right when they said it. The Linux community is in most respects a stateless communist community where everyone is contributing to the common good and no one is exacting property rights in return. It is an example of a true virtual commune that seems to work very well.
"the memory of the hundreds of millions killed by Communism"
Nice attempt to say:
Communism = killing millions of people
There isn't really any correlation. For example:
Fascism = killing millions of people too
Capitalism = killing millions of people too
Americans murdered millions of native American's by various means and generally practiced ethnic cleansing to push them out of their ancestral homes, and on to lands that were for the most part desolate and encouraged them to wither away and die. Many were killed in the process either directly or through famine and disease as Americans destroyed their primitive communes and their way of life in the name of profit and imperialism, the term used was "Manifest Destiny".
American's inflicted slavery on millions of people plucked out of Africa ag
@de_machina