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For Kerberos, I was a minor foot soldier in the Crypto Wars. Back in the mid 90s, Kerberos was restricted from export due to ITAR regulations (I had thought IT
by gumby 3y ago
For Kerberos, I was a minor foot soldier in the Crypto Wars.
Back in the mid 90s, Kerberos was restricted from export due to ITAR regulations (I had thought ITAR was obsolete, but just this year we had trouble purchasing some hardware in the USA due to ITAR restrictions).
Since IIRC Kerberos could be downloaded from MIT it's not clear how well these restrictions worked.
Nevertheless John Gilmore and I (maybe proposed by another of the Cypherpunks?) decided that we should get an ITAR-legal version of Kerberos in global circulation.
Before I ever left or contacted anyone about this a policy lawyer blessed it, and even talked about it with some people from the Commerce Dept, so everything was legal and above board. I'm pretty sure NSA knew about it too (this was back when NSA took Information Assurance seriously -- I think back then it might even have been a whole directorate).
The first step was to make a version with all the encryption stubbed out. That "worked" in that two copies of this code would connect to each other etc...with all communication in the clear with no encryption at all and no pretend-encrypted anything either. I think it was OK to take a password and copy it into another buffer and then send the contents to the other side of the connection, but honestly I don't remember and actually (see below) don't know.
I then went to Switzerland where I arranged for a local cryptographer to take our neutered code and make it compliant with the published papers on Kerberos. At that time I knew nothing about Kerberos's encryption and hadn't even look at source (neutered or original) so I wasn't even accidentally "exporting" anything in my head and could be sure I couldn't say anything to make the work easier. It was literally "can you make this package work as described in the literature".
After they got it working they connected to some sites in the US and all worked properly. And then we "imported" the swiss version and put it on our FTP server at Cygnus (Cygnus paid all the bills too) for other US people to use. Now there was a single copy of the source that could be used to protect people anywhere. Until then, even US companies couldn't use it to communicate with overseas divisions, even ones staffed entirely by US persons.
- cryptonector 3y agoThe Swedes also started their own from-scratch implementation, known as Heimdal (https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal), which has a bunch of nifty things in it including a from-scratch PKIX/x.509 implementation and a from-scratch ASN.1 compiler and library.
- schoen 3y agoAs far as I know, NSA still has an Information Assurance Directorate, they just seem to focus on government, military, and government and military contractors' information security, rather than the general public's. A big contribution of the cypherpunks and hacker community has been cultivating the intuition that everybody deserves information security (even if information security efforts for the general public aren't always very well-funded). (And thank you for contributing to that!)
- e12e 3y agoWhich implementation was this? Does the code linger somewhere?
- schoen 3y agoProbably this one? https://kerberos.org/dist/historic.html#CNS https://kerberos.org/dist/historic.html#CNS
- gumby 3y agoLooks like it.
- eichin 3y agoNot that the original article has anything to do with Kerberos other than design-by-analogy (not to knock the article, it's describing an interesting thing, and I'm always up for 90s nostalgia regardless of cause :-) but I think that version was more "MIT figured out that the change from ITAR to BXA and the published-code category made it reasonably safe for them to put anything up with a warning and possibly a registration". (CNS is the v4 release we shipped, which mostly got folded back in as an MIT krb4 patch release as well; we then shipped KerbNet which was V5 based, until we dropped the project entirely.)
- gumby 3y agoMark, you probably remember this project from your time at Cygnus and maybe you even were involved in it? I sorry I can't remember any more. As we both know MIT gets away with a lot simply due to its deep interdependence with literally every department in the federal government.
- eichin 3y agoYeah, I went to Switzerland in one of your followup trips to meet with the arms-length-contract cryptographers. (Which was legal at the time, but a loophole that got closed a year or two later because Sun's "ELVIS+" project for funding a russian team to do non-US crypto got too much attention...)