At 10:45 AM 6/17/93 -0700, Hal Finney wrote:

Another problem is that encrypted files look different from executable files. Encrypted files have a uniform histogram (that is, all 256 different possible byte values are equally frequent), but exe files do not.

Not necessarily. If you use pklite or lzexe, you produce an automatically self-decompressing executable that will appear to have a much flatter distribution than an ordinary exe file. What we need is a crypto version of pklite - instead of (or in addition to) compressing the executable, it encrypts it and sticks a stub decryptor on the front of the executable. Each time you run it, it prompts you for a password, decrypts and decompresses the executable and runs it. Phil