Re: The need for FREE cryptography ...

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

> It would be wonderful if somebody would put a
> reasonably secure package (much like PGP) and copyleft the source.
> ... What I'd need, if I wanted to integrate this technology into
> new platforms such as voice communication or an encrypted file system, is a
> library of tools for shuffling this data around and piping it through the
> "magic" algorithms.
> 
> I wonder if somebody on this list could outline what efforts are being made
> in this area.
Well the GNU MP library would be a good place to start (it implements
the raw RSA operations quite efficiently). It wouldn't be much work
to package it up with free code for Triple DES, IDEA, MD5, SHS and
some good "random" number generation algorithms.

What you are looking for is something like RSAREF with different
licensing terms.

If this sort of work were to be distributed it should be done by
someone outside of the U.S. and Canada.

At one point I wrote some code to do part of this based on GMP (using
LUC). I've seen old versions of it on anonymous ftp sites. Obviously
one would want to add DH key exchange and some other features, but it
did come with a very simple sample application called L3 which
implemented PGP/RIPEM-like public key encryption and signing. Certainly
if you can find an one of these old versions lying around on a ftp site,
you are free to do with it as you like (anything I wrote is in the public
domain)  

At this point, I do NOT plan to distribute any newer versions of
this, because of anticipated patent infringement claims and because
of the overly restrictive licence of GMP. It has essentially become a
project for my own personal research and amusement.

Mark

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