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[smb at research.att.com]

	         I just recently got MacRipem and find it much easier to use th
	an PGP,
	         and was wondering why I should use PGP over Ripem.  The above 
	seems to
	         indicate that Ripem isn't as secure.  Why is this?

	 I don't doubt that its much easier to use -- it was written by Ray
	 Lau, who is an excellent Mac/UI programmer.  The most reasonable
	 reasons why it might be called "less secure" is that RIPEM does not
	 have a signature web like PGP does.  It is possible in PEM to only
	 have one signature on your certificate, which can be your own
	 signature, or that of a CA.  Therefore, you either have the status of
	 "I say I am who I say I am", or a "Certification Authority says I am
	 who I say I am".

I can't speak for RIPEM, but that's not accurate for PEM.  You can have
as long a chain of signatures as you want up to the certifying authority.
That may not be as general as you'd like, but it's better than just a
single authority.

A bigger problem is that PEM uses DES rather than IDEA.  I just learned
of a new attack by Mitsuru Matsui of Mitsubishi that requires 2^43
*known* plaintexts, not chosen ones.  The note I received says that it
``breaks the scheme in 50 days on 12 HP9735 workstations''.  This was
presented last week at the Japanese Conference on Cryptography and
Information Security.