It was required to comply with US laws against exporting strong cryptography. In order to have a global standard the protocol had to be decoupled from the crypt

It was required to comply with US laws against exporting strong cryptography. In order to have a global standard the protocol had to be decoupled from the crypto implementation and clients had to be able to negotiate down to the (broken) crypto approved for export. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...