Real-time BBS Encryption??
David Reeve Sward
sward+ at cmu.edu
Wed Apr 7 13:38:27 PDT 1993
Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 7-Apr-93 Real-time BBS Encryption??
by Eric Hughes at soda.berkele
> For PC's, replacing the terminal software is really the best way.
> There is no effective abstraction of serial port hardware in the PC
> world. The int 0x14 driver in the BIOS was rampantly defective, and
> MSDOS does not provide a standard interface.
>
> As a result, almost all comm software on PC's talks to the serial port
> directly. Now in MS Windows, there is abstraction for ther serial
> ports, but I don't know how easy it is to insert a device layer.
Actually, there is a rather old (for the PC) abstraction called FOSSIL
(Fido Opus Seadog Serial Interface Layer ... or so). It is essentially
an extention/replacement for the BIOS int 0x14 driver. It is certainly
possible to further extend this for encryption by adding some functions
to the interface. The two FOSSILs I know of are X00 and BNU - They can
be found in oak.oakland.edu:/pub/msdos/fossil
--
David Sward sward+ at cmu.edu
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