It occurs to me that such a combined form would be useful for the idea of having a message that can get multiple results depending on the passphrase used. One example might work as follows: A section of data is placed at the beginning of the encrypted material. When it is decrypted or encrypted (depending on how one wants to work things) with a given passphrase, it turns out a series of bits, reiterated as needed. Each x bits is used to say how far along in the encrypted material the next piece of information making up one encrypted message (using the same passphrase) is. If you put in a different passphrase, you get a different series of bits, and thus use a different set of information for the encrypted material. The The major problem that I can see with this scheme is overlap between messages. I would guess that one would need to keep coming up with different data sections until one originated that wasn't a problem. How long this would take would depend on the value of x and how long the data section was. However, this should only need to be done once for a given set of passphrases and the corresponding key (used for all of them). Any alternate suggestions? Not being a programmer, I have no real idea how to put this concept into practice. (And, moreover, someone else came up with the idea of multiple data sets from a given encrypted message; I am simply suggesting a potential mechanism). -Allen