From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 94 09:19:35 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Crypto toolkit
Message-ID: <199404241620.JAA14255@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From: Peter Murphy <pkm@maths.uq.oz.au>
> I was most
> taken by the idea of a "Crypto Toolkit". I think it would be understand-
> able to write the code in plain, vanilla C (as opposed to C++). One
> good reason is the widespread availability of C compilers, especially 
> with UNIX. Additionally, C++ compilers do take up more space (although
> this would be more of an issue with PCs. 

I think Tim had in mind something that was accessible more from a higher-
level language than C or C++; ideally, something interpreted so you could
sit down and type in a few commands to get something useful.  Perl and
TCL are two languages which Tim mentioned and which have been discussed
here in the past.  Smalltalk might do, although it is not as "freely" avail-
able.

If you want a C toolkit, a good example already exists: the PGPTOOLS package
by Pr0duct Cypher.  It is available by ftp from csn.org in /pub/mpj to
US citizens, and probably from some European crypto sites as well.  This has
a bignum package as well as interfaces to IDEA and RSA encryption.  It also
supports processing of PGP message formats and key rings.  The latest
version has code for Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

Hal