p2p news / p2pnet: Last week, China didn’t know if its Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) would be picked up as an international standard.

It does now, and the answer is No.

"The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) overwhelmingly rejected China’s domestic wireless LAN technology as an international standard, deciding instead to approve IEEE 802.11i as the basis for a more secure wireless protocol," says the EE Times.

But China says it’s going ahead anyway, says the China state news agency Xinhua, quoting an official with the Standard Administration of China (SAC).

"The American standard has been used in a big market and the diplomatic relationship between the United States and other nations also influenced the voting choice of the national bodies," said the official, and telecommunications engineer Li Jinliang, "attributed the failure to obstruction from the monopoly groups in the IT industry".

802.11i, "mainly developed by Intel, has been accused of a security weakness because it adopted the WEP technology that is unsafe itself," says Xinhua. But WAPI, "developed by a private Chinese company named IWNCOMM, has so far, "proved safe".

Meanwhile, "A hint about whether the two sides can work together to include some of WAPI’s technology into an ISO standard should come in June when ISO members meet in Prague to discuss the results of the ballot," says the EE Times.

"In a statement released to EE Times, IEEE said it ‘remains committed to supporting the international standards process and maintains its offer to work with China to harmonize the WAPI technology with existing IEEE and international standards’."

Also See:
picked up - China’s new WAPI union, March 8, 2006
EE Times - ISO rejects China’s WLAN standard, March 12, 2006
Xinhua - China resolved to use home-grown WLAN security technology despite recent setback, March 13, 2006

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