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ARTICLE · 13 JANUARY 1998

Export Restrictions On SSL

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United StatesCorporate/Commercial Law
by
Stewart Baker
[email protected]

Fritz Fielding
[email protected]

December 1997

We've had several conversations with various officials in the Administration regarding the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. Our objective is to get more flexible export policies for SSL compliant products. Currently, export approvals appear to limit exports of 128-bit SSL products to banks and subsidiaries of U.S. companies.

The Administration has resisted approving exports to a broader set of end-users. They have reasoned that unless the SSL is implemented with public key cryptography and the users' keys are escrowed, law enforcement cannot get access to the plaintext without going to the operator of the system to recover the plaintext from the server. Getting cooperation when the operator of the system is also the target of the investigation would be a problem.

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