From AP via the New York Times (link):
The agency promoting China’s wireless encryption standard has accused a U.S. engineers’ group of waging a conspiracy that led a global organization to reject the Chinese system, the country’s official news agency said Monday.
China made the accusation in its appeal against the International Standards Organization‘s decision in March to reject its encryption system, known as WAPI, the Xinhua News Agency said.
China has asked the International Standards Organization to nullify its decision due to what it calls the engineer group’s “unethical activities,” such as allegedly conspiring against WAPI, insulting China, and using intimidation and threats, Xinhua reported, without elaborating.
“The serious violations are rare in ISO’s standardization history,” Xinhua quoted a statement by the official China Broadband Wireless IP Standard Group as saying.
See also EE Times’ “ISO rejects China’s WLAN standard” (link):
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.
Only 22 percent of ISO’s members supported China’s Wired Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI), while 86 percent favored 802.11i, according to documents obtained by EE Times. The voting wrapped up last Tuesday, but ISO doesn’t plan to make the results public until next week.
Also Xinhua’s “China appeals to ISO against Intel-dominated wireless encryption standard” (link):
The current WLAN standard maker, the IEEE (the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.), broke ISO rules when its national bodies voted on new technology to mend security loopholes in the IEEE802.11 standard, developed by Intel, the China Broadband Wireless IP Standard Group (BWIPS) said Sunday.
Li Jinliang, a telecom expert, said he believes China’s WAPI standard lost the ISO fast-track vote because the current WLAN market is dominated by Intel and voting for WAPI may hurt the interests of the monopoly group owning the existing technology.
China’s two appeals to the ISO, launched in May and April, asked it to overturn the vote because of the IEEE’s “unethical activities”, which included organizing a conspiracy against the China-developed WAPI, insulting China and other national bodies, and intimidation and threats.
