From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1996 21:57:21 -0800 (PST)
To: "P. J. Ponder" <ponder@freenet.tlh.fl.us>
Subject: Re: Information
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.961106181407.23406I-100000@fn3.freenet.tlh.fl.us>
Message-ID: <328179E5.4C19@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


P. J. Ponder wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Nov 1996, Edward R. Figueroa wrote:
> > I'm a new Cyberpunk!
> > Last,  I would like to know once and for all,  is PGP compromised,  is
> > there a back door, and have we been fooled by NSA to believe it's secure?

> As far as anyone knows that has publicly commented on it, PGP is presumed
> to be secure against known attacks.  By making the source code available,
> and basing the encryption on published methods - RSA and IDEA, PGP has
> been reviewed extensively by the world's experts on crypto, and those
> experts that publish their results have said there is no known easy way
> to crack it.  There are, of course, many experts who do not publish their
> results - for instance, cryptographers who work for intelligence
> gathering agencies.  What they have found out about RSA and IDEA the rest
> of us don't know.  There are efforts underway to prove mathematically how
> hard it is to break the sort of encryption that PGP is based on.

[snippo]

Just to make it easy for you:  PGP will keep out your snoopy neighbors on the net, but
if you're betting it will lock out the government, you're probably peeing up the
proverbial rope.