E-mail Privacy

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <1991Jun4.144731.685 at forwiss.uni-passau.de> baier at unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de (Joern Baier) writes:
>>From the crypt manual page:
>>     This program is not available on  software  shipped  outside
>>     the U.S.
>>Has anyone an idea why?
> Because of a severe case of the politician's stupidity syndrome.

Especially since exporting Enigma cryptographic technology to Germany
would be a clear danger to US national security. ;-)


Actually it's probably a good thing that the Unix crypt(1) command
isn't included in the standard distribution anymore.  Unix crypt is
pretty easy to break.  A few years ago a package called "cbw" (Code
Breakers Workbench) was posted to one of the sources groups.  With
this package one could interactively bash on the crypt generated code.
Encrypted mail files, latex files, shell scripts, or anything with a
known plaintext section would unravel pretty fast.  Using crypt for
anything more than its entertainment value is silly.

A much better encryption engine based on DES is available from various
source archives around the world.  From the COPYRIGHT and RENAME files:

    Copyright 1989 Antti Louko. All Rights Reserved.

    This is a DES implementation written by Antti Louko
    (alo at kampi.hut.fi). It is based on DES description found in D.E.R.
    Denning's book Cryptography and Data Security.  At this time you may
    use this program for non-commercial use. If you modify the program,
    you must add a comment in the modified file indicating who modified
    it. For commercial purposes please contact me.

    This program should compile just fine on VAX with BSD 4.3. On SUNS,
    you should edit Makerules to include -msoft-float option if you don't
    have FPU. For other machines you should typedef des_u_long to be an
    unsigned 32-bit integer type. If processor needs aligned multi-byte
    accesses, you may have to modify copy* -macros in des-private.h file.

-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    wolfgang at wsrcc.com (or) uunet!wsrcc!wolfgang
Snail Mail Address:   Box 6524, Alexandria, VA 22306-0524