January 29, 2007
South Korea's Infertile SEED
Gen has captured the cost of monoculture with his excellent look at the unfortunate result of some technology choices made in South Korea years ago:
This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls.
Where is this nation?
South Korea.
The constraints on web culture in South Korea are a result of the adoption of SEED, an essentially proprietary cryptographic cipher mandated by the Korean government. The Wikipedia page, in typical geek fashion, describes the technology but not its social implications. The official page for the technology, in typical governmental fashion, has a skin of friendliness tautly stretched over an underlying hostility.
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Anil, I've added the copy from above to the SEED page.
Hi Anil, thanks for the link.
The problem is not the SEED cipher itself. It is an IETF standard that is well-documented. That functionality could be added to Firefox with some work.
The problem (which I did not explain in enough detail in my post) is that each Korean citizen is issued a unique ID, sort of like a US Soc. Sec. #, which is tied to a certificate (to prove that "Jane Kim" is "Jane Kim") which is then packaged up in the Active X control. So the unique identifier cert. as well as the encryption cipher are bundled together in in Active X control. The Korean cert. auths. only issue Active X-based solutions. Koreans banking in S. Korea have to install that Active X control and then push "F7" whenever they want to invoke it, and non-Koreans in Korea, like US Forces in Korea, have no way to do online banking because they are not issued these items.
From what I can tell, the problem in Korea is not only technical but also political. A solution would also require every single Korean citizen to get a new certificate from the Korean CAs, as well as for every Korean website that used any kind of encryption mechanism to have to re-architect their site in order to support whatever new standard is ideal. It's not a small matter by any stretch of the imagination.
Gen, thanks for the update! It seems this is more nuanced than I'd thought, but the software challenge you're describing does seem daunting. I wonder if there's some clever hack to get around it... could someone start a new cert. auth in Korea?
I would not be surprised if you traced the current situation back to its roots, it would be shown to be caused by USA historic trade restriction on encryption algorithms.