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Has anyone heard of this book [_Top_Secret_ - Data Encryption Techniques] and ...

One interesting feature of the books I looked at was that one of them came with a floppy disk with code on it. I didn't notice anything on the first few pages about "Not for export" or a mention that the government treats crypto as munitions that need special permits to export - I assume the authors are unaware of this, or that the NSA doesn't really care about this level of crypto any more than they care about rot-13 being exported :-) - but you'd think the publishers would notice....

I was curious about that, too, but found out that the NSA declared it to be exportable. Note that there is no requirement that exportable crypto be marked as such. I've looked at the stuff in the book, and determined that I could probably crack most of it if I cared enough and had a fast computer. I also found that the author made a mistake in implementation that could cause some messages to not decrypt even if you have the right key, if you have a different brand of math coprocessor than the sender had. ___________________________________________________________ |\ /| | | | | \/ |o| | Michael Paul Johnson Colorado Catacombs BBS 303-938-9654 | | | | / _ | mpj@csn.org ftp csn.org \mpj\README.MPJ for access info.| | |||/ /_\ | aka mpjohnso@nyx.cs.du.edu mikej@exabyte.com | | |||\ ( | m.p.johnson@ieee.org CIS 71331,2332 VPGP key by finger | | ||| \ \_/ |___________________________________________________________|