This is a survey of existing and proposed laws and regulations on cryptography - systems used for protecting information against unauthorized access. Governments have long restricted export of cryptography for fear that their intelligence activities are hampered by the crypto use of foreign states and scoundrels. Since the rise of crypto use over the past decades, governments increasingly worry about criminals using cryptography to thwart law enforcement. Thus, many countries have passed laws or are considering laws to maintain law-enforcement and national-security capabilities through regulation of cryptography.
This survey aims to give an overview of the current state of affairs, with entries per country on import/export controls, domestic laws, developments to restrict cryptography, and developments favoring crypto use. For more background on the crypto policy dilemma, see Bert-Jaap's Ph.D. thesis The Crypto Controversy. A Key Conflict in the Information Society (Kluwer Law International, 1999).
Cryptography used for digital signatures is not covered by this survey. For regulation of digital signatures, see Digital Signatures and Law.
See also (but largely outdated): Stewart Baker & Paul Hurst, The Limits of Trust from August 1998 and the extensive survey by EPIC and GILC, Cryptography and Liberty 2000 (earlier version: 1998). And see generally on export controls Simo-Pekka Parviainen's thesis (particularly on the EU).
Please have a look at: the main country list for the current status.
Please join the Export Control mailing list and the Slack workspace of the OpenChain project from the participation page... and the corresponding Channel in our Slack workspace.
This survey of cryptography laws is based on several reports, information from the Internet and personal communications. We have not consulted all original texts of relevant regulations; in many cases, we have relied on the sources listed. These findings, therefore, do not pretend to be exhaustive or legally reliable.
This text comes originally from Bert-Jaap Koops' Crypto Law Survey site, and may be edited in the future.
This file, and the rest of the files in this repository, are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International.
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0