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Someone told me it was illegal to write your own encryption is this true?
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Simple answer is no. Even though the encryption algorithm is keep in secret, there are bunch of works(cryptanalysis) to break such a "black box" encryption algorithm. But when you design encryption algorithm(block cipher in this case), you have to evaluate your cihper against from known attack methods.
It's that if you do write your own algorithms, you need to realize that it will take a long time before you create anything that is actually capable of securing your information against a dedicated adversary in the real world. Cryptography is like sword fighting.
Because encryption products can be used for illegal purposes, including terrorist activity, the United States and many of the countries that you may visit may ban or severely regulate the import, export and use of encryption products.
Depends on the laws in your country/state. But unless you're in some tinpot dictatorship like North Korea, writing anything is very unlikely to be illegal. Now, if you came up with some super-dooper-ultra-secure-never-can-be-cracked encryption method that, miracle of miracles, actually IS uncrackable, then you're likely to run into trouble sharing it. "military-grade" encryption tends to be classified as "munitions" and is subject to export restrictions.
That being said, the odds of an amateur coming up with an actual bone-fide uncrackable algorithm are extremely slim. Anyone can write an encryption algorithm they cannot themselves crack, but that doesn't mean it's actually secure and likely is utterly trivial to crack by any half-decent cryptographer.
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Just writing it is not illegal. Well.... Maybe in some 3rd world country with a totalitarian government, but in general not.
But: Some countries (the USA among others) do have export limitations on shipping/selling encryption software across borders. You need a specialized lawyer to figure out what is/isn't allowed in that case.
However.... Rolling your own encryption for any sort of serious application is in general a bad idea. Designing a truly secure encryption algorithm is very, very, very hard. You better leave it to the experts and just use one of the many available algorithms in your own software/product.
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