From: Jonathan Zamick <JonathanZ@consensus.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 96 09:40:05 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: An IDEA whose time has come (Notes from the RSA Conference)
Message-ID: <v02120d01ad297b95a32c@[157.22.240.13]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Well the RSA Security Conference is over, and I finally had time to sleep.
Thus, I'll give you all a bit of my impressions.

First, there were a heck of a lot more merchants this year. Last year, there
were about 400 people. This year it was 1100, with a couple hundred waiting.
Thus the conferences were a bit more mixed in level of topic. (As one
person put it, the more interesting the title, the more likely it is a
blatant plug for a product.) On the other hand there were a number of great
conferences too. Sadly, I was busy at the Consensus booth and didn't have
time for many of them.

Last year Clipper was the big issue, but export controls were predicted to
be the big issue this year.

This year export controls were the big issue, but certificates were
predicted to be the big issue next year.

Lotus got low marks in everyone's book for setting the precedent of giving
the government 24 bits of their key. (As if France is going to be satisfied
with that solution.)

I didn't meet many Cypherpunks at this conference. Partially it may have
been because I was dirt tired after planning the booth in only two weeks,
and running it.

They had a lot of nice giveaways. I have a metal backed dayrunner which is
cute, an etch-a-sketch keychain which is causing rabid jealousy in the
office, and a nifty t-shirt with the logo 'A good marketing organization
listens to its customers'... then the picture of a woman on the phone w/
two spooks listening in.. finally 'We Hear You... Your NSA'.

Needless to say, I like it.

Anyway here is the point of the subject from this message. A while back I
asked for all your wish lists. One of the big issues was making IDEA
available w/ RSAREF. Well, I did even better, you can now license IDEA from
Consensus whether you use RSAREF or not. This was the biggest hit at our
booth. A number of groups saw a very strong, fast, Swiss block cypher as a
nifty thing. Imagine, you can use 128 bits in Europe. Right now I'm trying
to convince Ascom to develop a
crippled version of IDEA to simply give away if anyone wants it for export.
(Like most of the folk here, I don't see a 40 bit key as very valuable, but
it
is useful for companies which don't have contacts in Europe.)

As a little promo, Ascom, the company which developed IDEA, and will be
licensing it in Europe, announced a challenge. If you can break one
ciphered
message in the next year, they'll send you on a vacation to the Matterhorn,
give you a nice dinner w/ the creators of IDEA, and be really impressed. :)

Anyway, I'll be putting more information up on our web pages about IDEA.

If anyone wants info on my Etch-A-Sketch keychain, feel free to send me some
mail. If you want info on anything else, you can send email for that too.

Take care all.

Jonathan

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