From: "Mark Rosen" <mrosen@peganet.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1996 08:54:53 -0800 (PST)
To: "jonathon" <bgrosman@healey.com.au>
Subject: Re: Announcement: Very Good Privacy
Message-ID: <199611301658.LAA05327@mercury.peganet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> What puzzles me is that he included two cyphers that are _extremely_ easy
to
> break, the vignere cypher and the ascii cypher. Why include these? And
what
> is his new permutation of RC4 and DES?
	The reason I included ASCII and Vigenere was because they are very fast;
on a friend's machine, I can get 1.7mb/s with ASCII but only around 600k/s
with NewDES, the fastest "secure" cipher. I do agree that it is kind of
redundant to include both ASCII and Vigenere, as from a cracking
standpoint, they are both identical. As for Psuedo-RC4, that is just to try
to avoid a lawsuit from RSADSI; RC4 is a trademark. NewDES is an actual
algorithm; it's even mentioned in Applied Cryptography. It does have some
holes and is in fact less secure than DES (refer to Applied Cryptography
for details on this); I included that because it is fast and provides much,
much more security than ASCII or Vigenere, even if it is less secure than
DES.


Mark Rosen
FireSoft - http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/2690
Mark Eats AOL - http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/6660