House Bill Would Ban Crucial Crypto Research By Will Rodger, ZDNet Research crucial to producing secure computer systems in the U.S. could be banned outright if wording in proposed legislation to extend copyright law to cyberspace becomes law, experts warned last week. "This is scary. Everything we've worked for could go away," said Bruce Schneier, author of the seminal text Applied Cryptography. With just days to go before the House Telecommunications Subcommittee votes on the measure, industry lobbyists and cryptographers are scrambling to convince drafters of the House World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaties Implementation Act to strike language that would ban devices "primarily" designed to circumvent copyright protections such as digital watermarks and validation codes. Those protections are crucial to preventing online counterfeiting. But making sure they remain secure requires that computer technologists try to break them in the first place, rendering nonsensical distinctions between legitimate software used to test computer security and the hacking tools the bill would attempt to ban. Satan, a freely available software tool used for network analysis by computer security specialists, for instance, also is a favorite tool of network vandals. In a June 4 letter, the Association for Computing Machinery urged Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., to drop anti-circumvention language affecting cryptographic research as well as basic network operations. "Often, the exact same technology [encryption] is used to control access both to a copyrighted digital work and to certain components of a computer security system," wrote Barbara Simons, ACM Public Policy Chair. "System operators have important, legitimate reasons to circumvent such access control technologies to confirm the security of the password file or other vulnerable elements of the system." Senate drafters dealt with the same issues before passing a companion bill last month, but left their clarifications to a report accompanying the bill rather than the bill itself. This time, computer groups want language in the bill itself. The Senate can be reached at www.senate.gov -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:56:00 PDT