Jerry,

>Does anyone know if there is a new version of P.G.P. for the HP3000 that can
>be downloaded? If not, is anyone working on porting it to the HP.

PGP 5.0i can be built on MPE/iX with a fairly small amount of adjustments.
You can find a couple of related tips in a "Pretty Good Porting" paper at
the web site below. However, I have never dared to supply source or compiled
binaries on that web site, as it is inside the US (and thus most probably
subject to ITAR restrictions).

 http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/index.html#links

Notice, however, if you build PGP 5.0i on MPE/iX, you would need to contact
PGP Inc for permission to use it in other than non-commercial context. Maybe
they would even grant that permission because they don't want to waste time
or effort on thinking about an exotic legacy platform like MPE/iX...

;-)

An alternative to PGP could be GNU Privacy Guard from www.gnupg.org, which
can also be built on MPE/iX. I have a rough prototype that still has several
issues to be smoothened, but at least it seems to be working. Again, I don't
dare to put crypto related sources or binaries on the above web site as it
is inside the US. I could eMail you MPE diffs, if you'd want to compile the
gnupg.org sources on your system.

Notice, however, that my quick-and-dirty prototype is probably not ready
for production usage. For example, it uses a Java helper job to provide
randomness to the gpg program by "faking" /dev/random and /dev/urandom via
named pipes. I don't have a pressing need for gpg on MPE/iX at present, so
will probably not spend time to enhance this in the near future. Maybe you
or someone else feels inclined to do so.

:-|

A third option regarding crypto software might be exploring www.cryptix.org
and their JCE (Java Crypto Extensions) and OpenPGP implementations. The JCE
package provides a bunch of cryptographic algorithms (symmetric as well as
asymmetric ciphers, message digests, key generators, etc) that seem to work
on MPE/iX as well. The JCE package even seems to have PGP 2 routines, but I
have not yet tried them.

Their OpenPGP package is in progress, but being pure Java, I would not be
surprised if it ran on MPE/iX just like most of the other pure Java programs
that I played with in the past... So keeping an eye on www.cryptix.org and
their OpenPGP progress might be another option... They are also working for
MPE/iX, even if they have never heard about the HP 3000 :-)

Lars.

(only speaking for myself, as usual)