Sad state of affairs

It's a pretty sad statement of how poorly this list is functioning when
the RC2 source can be publically released but people would rather
sling mud over glorified keystroke trappers and rant about Nazi deathcamps.

Our friends at the NSA must be pleased with the slow death of this group.

Sadly,
Bofur.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bofur	bofur@alpha.c2.org
	PGP available from PGP key servers
	Key fingerprint = 81 0C 8F 88 0A 4F 67 3F  ED 52 DE 3C 55 34 26 25

bofur@alpha.c2.org writes:
 > It's a pretty sad statement of how poorly this list is functioning when
 > the RC2 source can be publically released but people would rather
 > sling mud over glorified keystroke trappers and rant about Nazi deathcamps.
 > 
 > Our friends at the NSA must be pleased with the slow death of this group.

Oh. Ok.


YIPPPEEE!!!  HOORAY!!!  YA HOOO!!!!!  RC2 IS PUBLIC!!!!  GOD BLESS US
ALL!!!  HOORAAAAAAY!!!!  YAY!!!!!



______c_____________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tivoli Systems * Austin TX   * I want more, I want more,
       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          * I want more, I want more ...
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         *_______________________________

On Tue, 30 Jan 1996, Mike McNally wrote:

> 
> bofur@alpha.c2.org writes:
>  > It's a pretty sad statement of how poorly this list is functioning when
>  > the RC2 source can be publically released but people would rather
>  > sling mud over glorified keystroke trappers and rant about Nazi deathcamps.
> 
> YIPPPEEE!!!  HOORAY!!!  YA HOOO!!!!!  RC2 IS PUBLIC!!!!  GOD BLESS US
> ALL!!!  HOORAAAAAAY!!!!  YAY!!!!!
> 
:-)

THere is no truth in the report that Algorithm choosers were added to
BSAFE so it would be easier to leave RC2 out :-) Assuming this is RC2, 
that is...

When someone reverse engineered Prince (the algorithm formerly known as 
RC4), that was significant as the code was in widespread use, and was a 
nice fast stream cypher, which was pretty much an empty niche. RC2 is 
fighting for an already populated area, battling IDEA, 3DES, etc, etc. 

Oh yeah, and RC4 is really pretty, whereas RC2, is as ugly as DES and friends

Any ideas on whether the comment in the source about the "effective
key length" trick being an export control deal is true?

If there were a known version of this floating around known to have a
40-bit restriction, is it likely that the restriction would be done by
always supplying "40" as the "bits" parameter, or would be it by
simply limiting the user key length?

______c_____________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tivoli Systems * Austin TX   * I want more, I want more,
       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          * I want more, I want more ...
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         *_______________________________

Mike McNally writes:

> Any ideas on whether the comment in the source about the "effective
> key length" trick being an export control deal is true?

It sounds plausable.

> If there were a known version of this floating around known to have a
> 40-bit restriction, is it likely that the restriction would be done by
> always supplying "40" as the "bits" parameter, or would be it by
> simply limiting the user key length?

The "bits" parameter guarantees that there are exactly 2^bits
distinct possibilities for the key schedule.  It does this by
re-calculating the key schedule as a function only of its
rightmost "bits" bits, after expansion of the user key to 
128 bytes.

One would not wish to directly limit the length of the user
key, since it would most likely be a passphrase of some sort. 

The "bits" parameter allows the effective key length to be
set in a manner which is translucent to the application and
its user interface. 

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $