From: markh@wimsey.bc.ca (Mark C. Henderson)
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 93 12:13:02 PDT
To: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: Cracking & auditing crypto protocols
Message-ID: <m0oU0xG-0000qaC@vanbc.wimsey.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> 
> The person who built the standard "network license manager" for Unix
> (flexlm) has offered us cypherpunks access to the protocol if we'll
> try to crack it.

My experience with network licence managers suggests that most of
them are more or less a joke in terms of security, anyway. Whether
this is due to the underlying licence software and protocols used in
that or poor integration on the part of the vendor, I don't know.

I did some investigation of this, a while ago, from the point of view
of designing something more secure than the currently available schemes.

I don't need to say it in this forum, but there is a long history
of people coming up with schemes for various types of security where
the designers claim a certain level of security that they don't
actually achieve. Licence enforcement software is also prone to this
type of thing.

Mark

-- 
Mark Henderson      markh@wimsey.bc.ca (personal account)
RIPEM key available by key server/finger/E-mail
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