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From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: FidoNet proposal for public key email encryption
Message-ID: <17149@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Fri, 31-Jul-87 14:54:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: glacier.17149
Posted: Fri Jul 31 14:54:03 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Aug-87 01:45:03 EDT
References: <2573@hoptoad.uucp> <2583@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 20


     This is an excellent idea.  It's time for the widespread use of public
key systems.  But one that is generally considered cryptologically sound
must be employed.  Recent progress on factoring and the knapsack problem
render public key systems, including RSA, based on those problems somewhat
suspect.  

     Whatever is done should be published in Cryptologia for comment before
it is deployed, since that journal seems to contain more "how I broke X"
type articles than anything else in the field.  You need to have the
system looked at by people who break cryptosystems.

     Incidentally, if getting binary data through FidoNet is a problem,
why not just recode every 3 bytes of binary data into 4 ASCII characters,
using 6 bits of data per ASCII character and 
coding only into printing characters.  Messages get 1/3 bigger, but
that's tolerable in exchange for not having to modify the network.


				John Nagle