The diplomacy of standards

Chinese Angry Over ISO Move to Take WAPI Off the Fast Track

China's efforts to make its WiFi security technology a global standard suffered a setback last week when the International Organization for Standardization opted to slow consideration of adopting China's WAPI technology while leaving a rival technology on a fast track for approval. There is some intriguing speculation on the IT Manager's Journal about what may be behind the move away from WAPI. There are apparently suspicions that China has a backdoor into WAPI and would be able to eavesdrop on compliant networks. The Chinese have the same concerns about rival 802.11i - believing that the US National Security Agency has cracked its 128-bit encryption scheme.