Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncc!lyndon
From: lyndon@ncc.Nexus.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Crypt() in Elm - This may be a problem!
Message-ID: <10291@ncc.Nexus.CA>
Date: 21 Jun 88 02:13:29 GMT
References: <470@altnet.ALTOS.COM> <278@clout.Jhereg.MN.ORG> <485@altnet.ALTOS.COM>
Reply-To: lyndon@ncc.nexus.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Organization: Nexus Computing Inc.
Lines: 19

In article <485@altnet.ALTOS.COM> edc@altnet.ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen) writes:
 
>I am currently evaluating several crypts for this purpose. If anyone has any
>suggestions, or a favorite quasi-crypt function, I'd love to hear from you.

I think including a crypt command with elm is just asking for trouble. The
differences in the results of shifts and rotates among compilers on
various architectures is almost guaranteed to cause the routing to break
somewhere along the line (as in 8/9/10 bit chars, and the corresponding
differences in their int's, etc).

As far as I am concerned, if two people want to send each other encrypted
mail they should implement their own compatable (with each others)
crypt(1) replacement. I don't think encryption should be part of the UA.
Let's use the man hours to develop some bullet proof parsing for return
addresses. We can always add the bells later.

-- 
{alberta,pyramid,uunet}!ncc!lyndon  lyndon@Nexus.CA