Re: word 97 decryption finally completed

Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Mon, 13 Sep 1999 14:16:03 -0400


At 11:40 AM -0500 9/13/99, Shaw Terwilliger wrote:
>I'm not sure I can be happy about this yet... not that the work isn't
>good or the feature needed, but I don't want to be deemed a criminal
>arms dealer by my government. :)

I don't know - it's kinda fun...

>AbiWord's CVS server is located in a country that prohibits its
>citizens from exporting strong cryptography. The definition of
>"strong" seems to change every day, and I'm neither a crypto expert
>nor a lawyer, so I'm really not sure how or if decryption of a
>stream qualifies as an armament.

Decryption only does not qualify, it's only the actual
encryption of data. This allows you to have a single product which
can decrypt any level of encryption (eg. both 40 bit and 128 bit RC4)
and then ship different encryption products depending on domestic vs.
international.

>Caolan, do you have any pointers to further information on the
>encryption scheme Word is using?

That would be generally interesting!!

Leonard

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