What Role Does the NSA Play in Commercial Cryptography?
The NSA’s charter limits its activities to foreign intelligence. However, the NSA is concerned with the development of commercial cryptography because the availability of strong encryption tools through commercial channels could impede the NSA’s mission of decoding international communications; in other words, the NSA is worried lest strong commercial cryptography fall into the wrong hands. The NSA has stated that it has no objection to the use of secure cryptography by U.S. industry. It also has no objection to cryptographic tools used for authentication, as opposed to privacy. However, the NSA is widely viewed to be following policies that have the practical effect of limiting and/or weakening the cryptographic tools used by law-abiding U.S. citizens and corporations; see Barlow [Bar92] for a discussion of NSA’s effect on commercial cryptography. The NSA exerts influence over commercial cryptography in several ways. First, it controls the export of cryptography from the U.S.; the NSA
