The CipherSaber Manifesto

[Antonomasia]

reinhold at world.std.com (Arnold Reinhold) wrote:

> CipherSaber-1 (CS1) uses Ron Rivest's RC4 algorithm as published in
> the second edition of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. ....

> CipherSaber-1 is a symmetric-key file encryption system. Messaging
> takes place by attaching binary files to e-mail. Because CipherSaber
> uses a stream cipher, an initialization vector must be used to prevent
> the same cipher key from being used twice. In encrypted CipherSaber-1
> files, a ten byte initialization vector precedes the coded data. For
> decryption, the initialization vector is read from the file and
> appended to the user key before the key setup step.  ......

Why not _prepend_ the IV to the key ?  As described here any
paranoics who use keys > 255 chars won't get the IV in place, and
will lose out.  I think I'd also force 4 bytes of the IV to be the
current time, as a defence against the (P?)RNG getting me a repeated IV
eventually.

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# Antonomasia   ant at notatla.demon.co.uk                      #
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