From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 23:12:56 -0700 (PDT)
To: "Ian F. Silver" <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: SecDrv and Win95
In-Reply-To: <199808050819.KAA06317@replay.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980806202703.008a8e60@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:50 AM 8/5/98 -0500, Ian F. Silver wrote:
>I found an interesting "mount a container as a drive letter"
>encryption program in finland called "BestCrypt NP", [...]
>It has three algorithms that you can pick from for encryption:
> GOST28147-89 (32 rounds, 256 bits primary key, 512 bits secondary key)
> Blowfish (in Cipher Block Chaining Mode with 256-bit key length and 16 rounds)
> DES
>I use Blowfish and GOST (depending on the size of the container I'm
>working with), and avoided DES, even before Deep Crack was invented. 

Never Never Trust GOST !!!  
The security of GOST depends on the quality of the S-Boxes (or whatever
the equivalent fields in GOST are called).  The Soviets provided
different sets for military and civilian use, and unless you know a lot
about the design, you can't tell strong ones from weak ones -
you have to worry about differential and linear cryptanalysis,
plus any other attacks that may have been developed over the years.
You're better off using 3DES if you like old slow algorithms;
in this case, I'd stick to Blowfish.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639