On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Bruce Schneier wrote:
Sorry. I am under NDA. Hopefully Arcot will explain sooner rather than later. I suggest not using the product until you are satisfied.
I'd say the following has been well established by now - - The people at ArcotSign are not completely clueless - They're doing things in a possibly sub-optimal way as far as publically explaining their algorithms, but this is a decision on their part, it's not that they don't have reasonable algorithms to back things up - They're not releasing due to being afraid of people copying their product before they've gotten sufficiently far in development/achieved some market penetration. Those of you who don't work at startups might not be familiar with this sort of thinking, but it's completely reasonable - if you go around telling everybody all the little details of how to make things work, some large company might make a very quick bastardized version and throw lots of marketing oomph behind it. - Their marketing materials are a bit misleading. This they can reasonably be faulted for. In short, at worst it's a poor product, but not 'snake-oil'. I have no idea whether it's a *good* product, since I've never looked at it, but for all I know it might be the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think that pretty much sums up everything there is to currently say on the subject, until ArcotSign releases more details. -Bram (Who isn't talking about what he's working on until the official release of a reasonably well fleshed-out product comes out.)