The Commerce Department has granted three companies permission to export 56-bit encryption technology under the Clinton administration's policy released just before the New Year.
Cylink of Sunnyvale, California, Trusted Information Systems of Glenwood, Maryland, and Digital Equipment Corp., of Maynard, Massachusetts, are the first to export 56-bit encryption - with technology allowing for a key recovery system.
"We were approved because we had a good idea of what the government wanted," said Chuck Williams, chief scientist at Cylink and developer of CyKey, the company's optional key recovery mechanism. "CyKey is very flexible on who is the key recovery agent - it's not necessarily the federal government."
The Commerce Department policy allows for an unlimited number of encryption manufacturers to export the stronger 56-bit encryption technology over the next two years as long as they provide a key recovery option. Before now, the only encryption technology allowed for export were 40-bit key recovery systems - which have long been considered weak, and were proven so last week when a college student cracked 40-bit encryption in less than four hours.
The administration's new encryption policy has been panned by privacy advocates who say that the White House's devotion to a "third party" key recovery system is a violation of rights to store data without the government or any one else having access to it.
But Cylink disagrees. "This is not a privacy issue so much as it is more of a problem of accessing information," Williams said, noting that businesses have been clamoring for strong encrypted data while having the option of allowing more than one person to access the data in case of an emergency. Cylink provides encryption technology to Boeing, the US Postal Service, the Department of Treasury, NASA, and the Army.
"Our policy balances the needs of law enforcement and industry so that US companies can compete effectively overseas," Sue E. Eckert, assistant secretary for Export Administration at the Commerce Department, said in a statement. "The decision to allow Cylink to export 56-bit DES products under license exemption marks the start of a new flexibility in encryption policy."
