17 August, 2005

Visas for Chinese crypto researchers

Here's a news article on why a number of Chinese crypto researchers, including two of the discoverers of the collision attacks on SHA-1, Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu, were unable to get visas to present their work at CRYPTO 2005. Actually, it doesn't really explain why, just that they were unable, despite the intervention of NIST. Seems pretty daft to me.

I enjoyed Adi Shamir's satirical take on this at the CRYPTO rump session, where he suggested that Wang having "attacked US government systems" and having expressed a desire to "create collisions" might have contributed to the visa problems...he even got away with using a September 11 fireball picture to make his point.

2 Comments:

Blogger College Boy said...

The ridicule heaped on the State Department by Adi was indeed withering. I also like his "Hash Wars: Revenge of the NIST" poster. I am glad that Wang choose to present her results here even though she was denied a visa.

-Mike

11:30 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I know so many cases getting a visa was a serious hindrance. As for me, my boyfriend and I couldn’t meet for a too long time because of the fact that we lived in different countries, and neither he nor I was given a visa… It always irritates so much.

6:50 am  

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