new encryption algorithm ever since craig rowland posted his piece new encryption to sci crypt there has been some discussion of our company secured communications technologies inc and on encryption algorithm nea i spoke to craig at length on and we covered a lot of ground some of the information in the posting requires some clarification and i would like to answer some of the questions raised on sci crypt sct is a small company based in silver spring maryland our two main products at this time are a pc based secure communications program called secom and a general purpose encryption chip which uses the nea algorithm developed for secom secom provides an encrypted secure communication link between two pc s connected over dial up telephone lines it supports simultaneous bi directional file transfer and keyboard to screen chat it has its own proprietary communications protocol which is tightly integrated to the encryption all though it is a packetized link the data stream appears to be continuous because the packet boundaries are hidden when secom was initially developed it was implemented to use des encryption a business decision was made to seek export approval for the product because it was perceived that the overseas market was a large one and provided a good marketing opportunity we soon found out that we would never be granted general export approval for anything using des all though the reason for this was never explicitly stated it seems to have something to do with secret government to government agreements which are still in effect in any event the decision was made to develop a new and different algorithm which would take the place of des this was the reason nea new encryption algorithm was born at this time nea is being held as a trade secret the preliminary work of patenting it has begun and the plan is to make it public once the patent process is complete all though one can make certain legal arguments for keeping it an ongoing secret i think in the case of an encryption algorithm it is necessary to let people shoot at it over an extended period of time to prove its worth in order to get export approval for secom nea it was necessary to go through nsa and to reveal to them the details of the program and algorithm this was done only after we had a finished product to submit let me state unequivocally that there is no back door to the program or the algorithm secured communications technologies is a closely held private company and nsa fbi cia nist whatever has no financial interest in any way whatsoever with the company or any of the people involved from a practical business standpoint we are interested in selling chips and software hopefully in large quantities and a back door to the encryption if found out could destroy our credibility and our business with the encryption algorithm approved for export we set out to talk to a number of potential customers for encryption products and systems we were able to identify several common threads of functionality requirements this led to the design of a chip with the encryption algorithm cast in silicon and certain other capabilities added so that the chip could fulfill the broad range of requirements that we identified we are strongly opposed to the clipper capstone chips in a press release today our president dr stephen bryen stated it seems as if the government has an unlimited source of funds to use to push its new bugged chips on the american public but do we not understand how the national security agency which is not supposed to be involved in domestic spying can fund the development of a commercial chip intended to accommodate u s government domestic spying activities if they had asked me to put a back door in nea i would have told them to g f ed can nsa break nea or for that matter can they break des rsa idea diffy hellman pgp rc rc or whatever i don t know and probably never will
