Jim Galvin forwards information indicating that MD5 appears to be
exportable. Readers of these lists may also be interested in the fact
that for at least a year Xerox has made the Xerox Secure Hash Function
(that's Merkle's Snefru, now up to version 2.5 with 8 passes---4 passes
is in roughly the same state wrt differential cryptanalysis as DES is)
available for anonymous ftp; I am under the impression that Xerox
lawyers consider this to be perfectly legal. For practical purposes the
only difference between MD5 and Snefru is that MD5's sponsor is rather
more heavily involved in planning the future of Internet cryptography.
This lends further support to the general conclusion that one-way hash
functions are exportable. Of course, you should check with Xerox before
acting on this information.
---Dan