On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Andrew Lowenstern wrote:
It has been a while since I looked too, does it work with the 'new' format messages generated by MIT pgp?
I don't think it does by default, but you can just change the code that looks for a version number to accept version 2 or 3. Works for me...
Does anyone actually USE pgptools for any available applications? As far as I know, nobody uses it.
Magic Money Privtool Mixmaster Dunno about anything else....
Either nobody really wants a PGP library (which isn't true judging from the inquiries on cypherpunks), or something is wrong with PGPTools. Is it the documentation like you said? Maybe some of us should pick up where pr0duct cypher left off and enhance PGPTools.
I'd say there are three problems, firstly there's very little documentation, which isn't a problem for those of us who can read and understand the source code, but could be for more general use, secondly it's not entirely legal in the US (patents, etc) and not widely available outside (there are some versions on ftp.dsi.unimi.it, but you have to actually go looking for it if you want to find it). The other problem is that the interface is very low-level, which makes it difficult to just take a standard PGP message and decrypt it in your program. You can get around the latter by using pgplib.c from Privtool (it's been released under the GPL), however it's only really been tested on Suns at this point and may need a bit of hacking - if you port it to other machines please mail me any bugfixes. It also has some potential security problems, for example there are lots of places where it should probably zero the memory that's been used but doesn't (I've fixed most of those in my own copy). But otherwise it's a pretty good product and I'm suprised that more people don't use it. There also appears to be a bug in pgpk_findkey() such that it only looks at the first id on each key, so if you request a key by another id it fails to find it. Does anyone know if Pr0duct Cypher is still updating PGP Tools, or should I look at fixing this instead ? Mark