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.

Tags: Cryptography , Encryption , SHA-1