Not to defend the safemail folks, but this does remind me of something that NeXT did with Eliptic curve based systems; there was no storage of the private key, it was generated from the passphrase at run time. It was a side discussion, maybe with Andrew Lorenstien? Andrew? Daniel R. Oelke wrote: | All in all they guy was plesant enough, but no real | details on how the system works. What I got was that | they "private" key is what you type in. This is then | hashed (he even used the word hash) into a 22 character | public key that you share with your friends. | Even at 8 bits/charcter, 176 bits doesn't sound secure | for a public key algorithm, but then again this isn't | RSA we are looking at. -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume