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March 20, 2006

WAPI Unwrapped

EE Times provides more detail on the history and future of the WAPI standard in China: The security standard has been rejected by international standards group ISO "overwhelmingly." The Chinese backers declined to release details of the encryption algorithm, the development process was closed, and there were concerns about its integration with existing 802.11 standards. The group overseeing WAPI's development is still railing against the IEEE for what it alleges are violations in ethics and procedures in ISO voting.

Intel, in this report, has stated its terms for integrating WAPI: Interesting major companies using the standard, and certification and interoperability.

This article is the first I've seen that's drawn a line between elements of the government that would be interested in monitoring WLAN communications: "Some observers believe the company has close ties with military and security forces, based upon a survey of its backers, whose public backgrounds don't suggest they would have the capital to back a startup." I've said from first hearing about WAPI that there is zero chance it doesn't include backdoors for government monitoring.

2 Comments

You sound paranoid. Asserting that the Chinese government has a backdoor to WAPI is along the same lines of people in China assering that the U.S. government has a backdoor to AES.

Yes, I understand that one cipher is open while the other is not. You still sound paranoid when you write things like that.

[Editor's note: Paranoia is irrational. The Chinese government has consistently and often publicly required direct observation of Internet traffic. The idea that WAPI would be developed without scrutiny by a group with alleged ties to the military and security apparatus of the state and not have the ability for those agencies to observe traffic passing across secured WLAN networks is simply absurd.

The only way to have a specification without either intentional or accidental backdoors is to open it to scrutiny. Since the Chinese won't, WAPI will never be used outside China.--gf]

The "allegations" that WAPI was developed by a company with close ties to the military and government is complete speculation based on no evidence whatsoever. It was largely put forward by people who are promoting 802.11i.

Whatever synonym of paranoid you want to use (mistrustful, suspicious, etc.), you fit it when you make statements like that about WAPI.

I should say that I am in agreement on the general point that it is unrealistic to expect that WAPI will be widely used without its cipher being opened to scrutiny from international cryptologists. It also lacks extensiblity for future encryption types and backwards compatibility for WLANs in transition from WEP. All that being said, let's be fair when we criticize WAPI rather than going off on wild, borderline jingoistic speculation.