From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 15:06:31 +0800
To: "Silvakow" <ea2onov@atlas.moa.net>
Subject: Re: PGP for Windows 95
In-Reply-To: <B0001773986@atlas.moa.net>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970617235457.0075b1d8@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 08:55 AM 6/17/97 +0000, Silvakow wrote:
>Has anyone yet checked out PGP for Windows 95?  It's $50 at stores 
>right now.  Information from pgp.com, but I want to know more before 
>I buy it.  Is it worth it?  Should I stick with PGP for DOS?  And 

Get the beta at www.pgp.com and try it out.  I've been very pleased
with it - the integration into Eudora is very nice, and the
PGPtray icon works much better than the Enclyptor did - you can
encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify to and from the clipboard,
making it easy to work with non-PGP-aware applications.
The key management has been mostly separated from the encryption,
which was really the right thing to do anyway,
and if you like GUIs, it's got one.  

If you're trying to write programs to integrate PGP
without using the GUI, you'll have to do some work again;
enough of the details have changed.

>does anyone know if those PGP public keys are compatible with DOS PGP?

PGP 5.0 uses two types of keys - the familiar RSA keys, which are handled
compatibly with previous versions of PGP, and new-algorithm keys,
which use DSA for signatures, Diffie-Hellman for encryption, and SHA-1 hashes.
It can use the old keys, and generate RSA keys you can use with older PGP,
but obviously the older PGP can't use the DSA/DH keys.  I don't remember
if the freeware version that you can get at MIT will also generate 
new RSA keys or only use them.

The keyring files themselves are obviously different, since they 
can contain DSA/DH keys and some other data, but they're upward compatible.


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)