#5346 BLOC Future : Assist with the preparation of encryption export-control documentation.

Zarro Boogs per Child bugtracker at laptop.org
Fri Jan 4 06:04:35 EST 2008


#5346: Assist with the preparation of encryption export-control documentation.
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  mstone   |       Owner:  jg            
      Type:  defect   |      Status:  new           
  Priority:  blocker  |   Milestone:  Future Release
 Component:  distro   |     Version:                
Resolution:           |    Keywords:                
  Verified:  0        |    Blocking:                
 Blockedby:           |  
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------

Comment(by gnu):

 All of your crypto software is open source, even the firmware, so it
 should fall into the TSU exception.  This is straightforward and doesn't
 require a lot of documentation sent to the government -- at least last
 time I looked.  I think you just have to mail the top-level website
 address on which the software is exported, annually, to an address at BIS
 that (last time I looked) was bouncing anyway.  You could run a cron job
 that mails it daily, just to be sure.  This corner of the regs is
 something the govt won't point out to you, but was required to settle the
 Bernstein lawsuit which argued successfully that requiring a prior license
 to publish open source crypto software violated the First Amendment as a
 prior restraint on scientific/engineering publication.

 You do have a CPU chip that does AES in hardware, but it's got so many
 limitations that I think we're currently ignoring it and doing it in
 software.  It would be amusing but unlikely if you couldn't ship any
 Geode-based products because they implement the US government recommended
 crypto standard.  Ask AMD for export advice on Geode-based products.

 Similarly, the !WiFi chip's embedded encryption support is all following
 global IEEE standards like every other vendor.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5346#comment:4>
One Laptop Per Child <http://dev.laptop.org>
OLPC bug tracking system



More information about the Bugs mailing list