jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (07/07/87)
A delightful paper on encryption packages for the IBM PC appears in Cryptologica for January 1987. Titled "A Survey of Data Insecurity Packages", the abstract says it all: "Five commercially available packages for the IBM PC are described and broken." Martin Kochanski tells how he broke each system, and gives the details so that others can also break them. Four of the five encryption algorithms are vulnerable to an unknown plaintext attack and can be broken with a few minutes of computation on an IBM PC. The fifth, which the maker claims can resist a known-plaintext attack, can't. John Nin gx