Re: PGP: USA-Legal PGP Project

[markh@wimsey.bc.ca (Mark C. Henderson)]

> Unfortunately, wide distribution in the USA of PGP, the most popular
> product, is inhibited because it violate's RSA's patents.  PGP has
> already been chased off some USA FTP Sites.  But this problem has a
> solution!  I confirmed with Jim Bidzos, President of RSA, who was
> present at the meeting, that a USA Legal version of PGP could be
> constructed by just replacing certain sections of code with free code
> from RSAREF.  Since source for both PGP and RSAREF are available, this
> sounds like an easy job.  Since no-one's actually done it yet, perhaps
> it's not, but I will try.  I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can
> chew. At best, I can compile and test only the MSDOS version of PGP. I
> will certainly need help if USA-Legal MAC, AMIGA, UNIX, etc. versions
> are to be available.

You should be able to do it. But, you will first have to get permission
from RSADSI to access RSAREF in ways other than by the published interface. 
I trust they'll grant it, given what you say above.

Also, be sure to get the RSAREF version included with RIPEM (wait for
version 1.07 if you can). It has several significant performance 
enhancements (generic and some platform specific asm versions of
time critical code).

You won't be able to export this 'legal' version of PGP. Tracking
and updating to new PGP releases will be a pain as much of
the development is done outside of North America.

Mark

-- 
Mark Henderson
markh@wimsey.bc.ca
RIPEM key available by key server/finger/E-mail
  MD5OfPublicKey: F1F5F0C3984CBEAF3889ADAFA2437433