[comp.sys.isis] V2.1 general release: soon, has new security tool

ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (08/28/90)

We are getting some useful feedback on V2.1 BETA and it looks
as if we can go over to the general release by the end of next
week:

- Tim's "hack" seems to work around the HPUX problems
- LISP is up again ("select" was getting a bad argument)
- makefile bug in MACH corrected (needs -lthreads -lmach)
- buf in lmgr corrected (should use "l_fp", not "*l_fp", in fseek, fwrite)
- documentation didn't mention need to do a "make install" now

We're also fixing a few minor bugs that astute users have brought
to our attention.  

On another note, a new feature:

One ISIS user, Mark Steiglitz, has developed an authentication/security
tool for ISIS.  We hope to have this in the general release before it
goes out.  Mark and I have also written a paper on this and he'll post
the abstract and make the postscript available shortly.  Basically, it
uses a Needham/Schroeder logic to develop a provably secure mechanism
for verifying the UNIX user-id under which a remote process is running,
and uses RSA and DES to support a user-id based public key cryptosystem
and encrypted channels.  Mark will also provide a manual page.