Unfortunately, wide distribution in the USA of PGP, the most popular product, is inhibited because it violate's RSA's patents. PGP has already been chased off some USA FTP Sites. But this problem has a solution! I confirmed with Jim Bidzos, President of RSA, who was present at the meeting, that a USA Legal version of PGP could be constructed by just replacing certain sections of code with free code from RSAREF. Since source for both PGP and RSAREF are available, this sounds like an easy job. Since no-one's actually done it yet, perhaps it's not, but I will try. I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew. At best, I can compile and test only the MSDOS version of PGP. I will certainly need help if USA-Legal MAC, AMIGA, UNIX, etc. versions are to be available.

You should be able to do it. But, you will first have to get permission from RSADSI to access RSAREF in ways other than by the published interface. I trust they'll grant it, given what you say above. Also, be sure to get the RSAREF version included with RIPEM (wait for version 1.07 if you can). It has several significant performance enhancements (generic and some platform specific asm versions of time critical code). You won't be able to export this 'legal' version of PGP. Tracking and updating to new PGP releases will be a pain as much of the development is done outside of North America. Mark -- Mark Henderson markh@wimsey.bc.ca RIPEM key available by key server/finger/E-mail MD5OfPublicKey: F1F5F0C3984CBEAF3889ADAFA2437433