Miron Cuperman says:

Let's talk less and do more. :)

How about adding encryption to kermit and iScreen so that they may talk to each other in a secure manner? I am proposing these two programs because they are widely portable. kermit works on most Unix and MSDOS systems. iScreen works on most Unix systems.

(Note that this would solve the network/modem eavesdropping problem, but not the untrusted remote system problem. The latter has no solution in my opinion. You just have to trust the sysadmin.)

I propose writing a link encryption library which could be usable in other comm and BBS programs.

A good idea, but getting the protocol right is hard -- you don't want to put any real overhead on the line, but you also want to do error detection and resychronization so that your cypher will run properly. Discussing a proposal for a line protocol that has these features would, of course, be germane to the list. Perry

Nickey MacDonald says:

I may have missed something, but I don't see where synchronization is a concern. The whole of idea of Kermit is to provide a "binary" path between two computers. It is Kermit's responsibility to ensure the data is received in the same order as sent (sychronization is part of the Kermit protocol, no?).

I don't belive people were talking about Kermit the Protocol. They were talking about Kermit the PD terminal emulation software, which contains Kermit the Protocol. Obviously the protocol can handle error correction -- but that does nothing for you if you want to log in to a machine and do arbitrary things. Perry