At  6:04 PM 3/12/96 -0400, Chris Bartram wrote:
>My point in all this(sorry for rambling) is that we'd very much like to see
>an industrial-strength encryption solution for the 3000, and I don't think
>it would even be a difficult port, but perhaps the folks at RSA need to hear
>from some more (potential) customers to get the wheels moving...
 
Two notes: first, RSA holds patents on _public-key_ cryptosystems. If you
don't need the features of a public-key system -- and it seems like the
original poster's application doesn't -- there are a number of alternatives
which can easily be ported to the 3000 if they haven't been already. DES is
"industrial-strength" in a literal sense, especially if used three times
with three independent keys. It's also public-domain. (Also, public-key
systems are rarely used directly for encryption since all the current ones
are very slow for any reasonable level of security. Most of the time,
public-key systems are used to exchange keys for a symmetric cipher, which
is then used for bulk data.)
 
Second, go to your nearest (good) bookstore and buy a copy of Bruce
Schneier's _Applied Cryptography, 2nd edition_. This is an excellent
reference with lots of information about security in general, as well as
being a survey of many encryption algorithms and cryptanalytic results
against them. You need the book for the security and systems engineering
information even if you never intend to implement a cryptographic system
yourself. The source code discs, available to U.S. purchasers only, contain
code for many cryptosystems, including several public-key systems. Again,
some of this is in the public domain, or is copyrighted but freely
redistributable. I needed a message digest algorithm for a data base
application recently, and turned to the source code discs to get MD5, a
freely-redistributable message digest algorithm that produces a 160-bit
digest of a message of any length. The code compiled and ran with no
problems on the HP 3000.
 
-- Bruce
 
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