Subject: Re: Commit: Password dialog
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 17:58:40 CDT
On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 11:35:13PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> Question:
> is the password dialog generic enough to open password protected zip
> files? (i know that currently abiword uses gzip, but im talking about if
> and when abiword uses zip or gets a filter for Open Office)
I assume so, but IMHO this is a really bad idea. While what I hear
from Dom is that MS Word encryption is popular, I have never seen an
encrypted-zipped AbiWord document. Adding the functionality would
encourage its use. PKZip encryption is *badly* flawed, see Applied
Cryptography (breakable-in-a-couple-of-minutes-on-a-modest-computer
bad). It isn't the kind of standard we would want to encourage, or
even waste time implementing.
This paragraph on gzip.org sums up what I think is a very good
attitude to apply to abiword:
Does gzip support encryption?
No. Simple encryption algorithms such as that of PKZIP can be
broken. And adding strong encryption such as that of PGP to
gzip would not make much sense because that would duplicate the
functionality of those encryption programs. PGP already
incorporates the gzip compression code, so use PGP if you need
compression plus strong encryption.
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