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China Frustrated In Encryption Talks
mikesd81 writes "According to an AP article, the Chinese are pushing for the encryption standard called WAPI. It's not going so well, as the majority of countries are taking the IEEE standard 802.11i. From the article: 'An international dispute over a wireless computing standard took a bitter turn this past week with the Chinese delegation walking out of a global meeting to discuss the technology. The delegation's walkout from Wednesday's opening of a two-day meeting in the Czech Republic escalated an already rancorous struggle by China to gain international acceptance for its homegrown encryption technology known as WAPI. It follows Chinese accusations that a U.S.-based standards body used underhanded tactics to prevent global approval of WAPI.'"
Isn't it possible the Chinese could be pushing an encryption standard because they know a flaw in it they can exploit?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The Chinese want their encryption to be the standard so that they can use their backdoor.
The US wants its encryption to be the standard so they can use their backdoor.
I'm not trying to be negative, especially towards China... However, I would never accept a security concept from any government that filters and censors their country's internet. Seems like an oxymoron to me.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
It's always a possibility that Rijndael was chosen because the NSA noticed a vulnerability in the algorithm which the rest of the cryptanalyst community hasn't found, but it does seem (vanishingly) unlikely.
I trust Rijndael with my data for now, I've yet to see a good reason not to. Just because the NSA decided to adopt it doesn't make it vulnerable. The NSA adopted Linux too, does that make Linux vulnerable?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The point of wireless encryption isn't to prevent anyone from sniffing the data. As soon as the data leaves the AP, it reverts to whatever form of traffic it was - POP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, whatever. The Chinese have more than enough access to intercept any network traffic in China in a centralized location; they don't have to sit outside your home sniffing wireless traffic.
I've always thought that WEP and it's like are overrated. If you want something to be secure, you need end-to-end encryption. You shouldn't be sending confidential data over _any_ part of the network, wireless or not, without a secure protocol like SSH or HTTPS. If you have end-to-end encryption, WEP becomes much less important.
Extra crackability may not be bad, from the Chinese point of view; control freaks try to get as much power as they can, and I can see some bureaucrat pushing for this just because. Just like in the US, where we have officials who say they absolutely need some new privacy-intrusive measure even though existing measures already cover everything they could legitimately want (like warrantless wiretapping - or CALEA).
That is one clever piece of NSA-misinformation. Fairly standard for NSA though. And you bought it.
ze dog has no nose
It's also possible the NSA knew of some weakness, and then subtly changed the algorithm to fix it. The NSA's internal research is possibly many, many years ahead of the rest of the world's research. IIRC, when DES was being developed, the NSA made some changed to it, but didn't say why. Years later, when differential cryptography was invented/discovered, the NSA's changes made perfect sense because it made the algorithm resistant to many of those types of attacks.
Then world governments dictate that all WAPI-enabled router imports ship with an OpenVPN installer CD, and we all go the sane route of running trusted VPN software over untrusted open Wi-Fi connections.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?