[3701] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Wassenaar vs. CipherSaber
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Gillogly)
Fri Dec 4 17:10:33 1998
Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 13:03:37 -0800
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@acm.org>
Reply-To: jim@acm.org
To: cryptography@c2.net
"Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com> writes:
> ... descriptions on the CipherSaber web site http://ciphersaber.gurus.com ...
> Any comments, suggestions, endorsements and publicity are welcome.
I'll endorse it -- the pages give a good overview of the problem and solution,
and it is indeed easy to implement and test: one interested novice programmer
with little crypto background was able to crank out a version (I think he
used VB) in under a day that interoperated with mine. I've plugged it here
and there, including in my "President's Column" for the American Cryptogram
Association during my tenure (which ended this year).
It's a nice idea, since it's still legal in most countries to write and
run your own code and to exchange encrypted information, even if you're
not allowed to export the code.
A future version would probably want to make use of the current work on
RC4 (tm) and throw away the first 256 bytes of stream, but that's a second-order
effect at best.
--
Jim Gillogly
Trewesday, 14 Foreyule S.R. 1998, 20:54
12.19.5.13.7, 6 Manik 20 Ceh, Sixth Lord of Night
