> From: Chris Bartram
> Subject: pgp/RSA for HP3000 (Was: Data encryption
> Date: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 6:04PM
>
>  In <[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
> writes:
>
> > [description of setup -- needs data encryption]
> > Does anyone know of any encryption/decryption software that could be
used
> > in the above setup?  The source machine, most likely, will *not* be an
HP.
>
> Not entirely useful to you perhaps, but as we have also been looking into
> encryption solutions on the 3000 lately, thought I'd point out what I've
> found and hope someone out there might chime in with other info.
>
> There are two main camps in the (very) secure encryption game nowadays;
> pgp and RSA's technology.
>
> pgp was freeware, and though the legality of exporting it was the source
of
> many long winded debates, all commercial rights to pgp now belong to a
> company called "ViaCrypt". It's still free for "personal" "non-commercial"
> use, but anything else (including educational institutions) are required
to
> buy their licensed versions; at somewhere around $100-$150 per user.
 
There is a good, but obviously biased, book out on the market called "A
pretty good primer on Pretty Good Privacy" that goes into great detail about
the PGP/RSA tug-o-war.  About 1/3 of the book is reasons (and methods) to
encryp data, 1/3 to 1/2 on the above mentioned "history" of PGP, and the
rest devoted to understanding the command-line-based interface to PGP (as
used on many a Unix or MS-dos machine).  [This is one of those "nutshell"
books that has a single color spine and a plain cover with a pencil drawing
of an animal or other object.  In this case, it is a padlock]
 
PGP is probably your best bet if the "other machine" is a Unix machine.  A
less "industrial strength" solution is to simply compress the data with an
obscure compression scheme [i.e., not PKZIP] since a side effect of
compression is that the data is encrypted in the sense that if you don't use
the proper de-compression algorithm, you won't get back your original data.
 This will keep the casual observer from looking at your data, but won't
stop a determined cracker or information sleuth.