tzeruch@ceddec.com wrote:
On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Michael C Taylor wrote:
Entrust Technologies (www.entrust.com) has made Solo available for download, free for 30-day evaluation & edu/non-profit. For Win95/NT. A mere $49 Cdn (~35 US) for commerical usage...
Solo uses 128-bit encryption, which is CAST-128, the royality-free algorithm invented at Entrust/NorTel. It also uses 1024-bit RSA public-key cryptography and has DES, Triple DES available.
It would be interesting to know how they managed to do it. The fine print in the license says it cannot be exported from the US and Canada without a license (which a second press release says they have, but doesn't say they had to do anything to the program in order to obtain it).
Entrust didn't have to change the program in order to get permission for export of the product because it was designed with a built-in back door for the use of Entrust employees, anyway. Thus it was only necessary to drop off the back door password with the night janitor at the federal building in order to have export approval by early the next morning.
PGP 5 uses CAST (and 3DES and IDEA), with DH/DSA/SHA (or MD5 or RIPEM, and with an RSA backward mode). Does anyone know which hash algorithm Entrust/Solo uses?
Unfortunately, the person who designed and developed that particular part of the software has left the company in order to seek treatment for his drug and alcohol abuse problems. (I always wondered why he giggled every time someone said the word "hash.") I am confident that his work in this area was satisfactory and Entrust has every intention to hire another programmer to test the program if problems should arise in the future that affect our profit margin. I would be happy to answer any other questions you may have about the Entrust product, but right now the children's crying is really getting on my nerves, so I'd better go drop them off in the woods near their home (if I can remember where it was I picked them up). --- Chris Lewis "Forging 'In Good Faith'"