From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 13:43:33 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: No Subject
Message-ID: <199707220526.HAA13114@basement.replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Hey, has anyone taken a look at this file on RSA's ftp?
ftp://ftp.rsa.com/pub/smail/smailbeta10.zip
It is encrypted using only the zip cypher, as far as I can tell. There is a known plaintext attack against this cypher by Biham and Kocher. There are files compressed and encrypted in the archive that are freely available online. A known plaintext attack would seem easy but the files are compressed with a version 5.0 for NT. Is the encryption algorithm in this product different (more secure) than in other versions? Is it a good idea for RSA to distribute their software like this? Would it be legal to export (intentionally or not) files while encrypted and seemingly unusable if the algorithm used to encrypt could be easily broken?

Cheers!

--Anonymous