It would be wonderful if somebody would put a reasonably secure package (much like PGP) and copyleft the source. ... What I'd need, if I wanted to integrate this technology into new platforms such as voice communication or an encrypted file system, is a library of tools for shuffling this data around and piping it through the "magic" algorithms.
I wonder if somebody on this list could outline what efforts are being made in this area. Well the GNU MP library would be a good place to start (it implements the raw RSA operations quite efficiently). It wouldn't be much work to package it up with free code for Triple DES, IDEA, MD5, SHS and some good "random" number generation algorithms.
What you are looking for is something like RSAREF with different licensing terms.
What I would like to see is libraries from PGP, along with some additions. Why PGP? It would be nice to be able to use the optimized IDEA and RSA algorithms from PGP. More importantly it would be nice to write programs that use the well established key ring files. This would solve problems of key ring distribution. It would also mean that crypto programmers need not worry about their own random number generation, with all random number generation handled by the PGP libs. The advantage of this is that there would be 1 random number generator that did things right rather than a bunch of implementations that had subtle flaws. If everything shares the same implementation, that implementation can be strengthened much faster. The PGP library itself is not enough though, it is missing some things that should accompany it: DES/triple-DES and DH key exchange for example. Tim N.