[89] in linux-announce channel archive
[ANNOUNCE] PGPsendmail/Unix 1.4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lars Wirzenius)
Thu Jan 19 14:00:00 1995
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 19:03:16 +0200
From: Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi>
To: linux-activists@niksula.hut.fi, linux-announce@vger.rutgers.edu
X-Mn-Key: announce
From: rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU (Richard Gooch)
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] PGPsendmail/Unix 1.4
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Keywords: PGP, privacy, encrytpion, authentication, sendmail, e-mail
Organization: ?
Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Lars Wirzenius)
Followup-to: comp.os.linux.setup
Greetings. I am happy to annouce the public release of the
PGPsendmail/Unix Suite, v1.4. There have been many bugfixes and
features added since v1.3, so you should find v1.4 a more robust,
useful package. You can get it for anonymous ftp from:
ftp.atnf.csiro.au: pub/people/rgooch
ftp.dhp.com: pub/crypto/pgp/PGPsendmail
ftp.ox.ac.uk: pub/crypto/pgp/utils
linux.nrao.edu: pub/src/pgp/PGPsendmail
For those of you who don't have ftp access, send a blank message to:
slutsky@lipschitz.sfasu.edu
with subject line:
pgpsendmail
and you should receive a copy in the mail.
Regards,
Richard Gooch,
rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
Below is the README:
============================================================================
The PGPsendmail/Unix Suite
Richard Gooch rgooch@atnf.csiro.au
1) What is it?
The PGPsendmail/Unix Suite provides for automatic encryption and
decryption of Email messages, using PGP. The two main programmes are
PGPsendmail and PGPdaemon.
2) PGPsendmail
PGPsendmail is a drop-in wrapper for the standard sendmail
programme which resides as /usr/lib/sendmail on most Unix systems.
It allows the automatic encryption of outgoing messages by using the
recipient's PGP public keys. It does *not* provide for automatic
decryption of incoming messages: such a feature would necessarily
involve compromising your passphrase.
However, it can provide for automatic signing of outgoing messages by
using PGPdaemon.
PGPsendmail may be installed by your system administrator, allowing
everyone on the system to reap the benefits. Alternatively, it may be
privately installed by ordinary users. For the latter case, your
mailing software (eg. EMACS ViewMail, elm, UCBmail, etc.) must be told
to use PGPsendmail to deliver mail rather than the regular sendmail
programme.
Read the installation instructions before attempting to install. You
have been warned.
There is another package: PGPSendmail/AmigaOS which does much
the same thing as PGPsendmail except it runs on AmigaOS. See the
section on getting PGPsendmail/Unix for details of where to get
it.
3) PGPdaemon
PGPdaemon is a daemon, run by the user, which provides for the
automatic signing and decryption of messages. It will also
periodically read the users' incoming mail spool directory and will
move the contents to another spool file, decrypting any messages that
it can.
In order to perform these operations, PGPdaemon requires access to the
users' passphrase and secret key. On a secure system, this should not
pose a problem. On a public system, this may be a cause of concern.
However, if you are concerned about PGPdaemon compromising your PGP
secret key and passphrase, you should also be concerned about these
being compromised even if you are using PGP in the conventional way.
PGPdaemon is written based on the approach that if you compromise your
secret key and passphrase by using them on a public system, you may as
well make it as convenient as possible.
Since PGPdaemon does not require the passphrase to be stored in an
environment variable, it should be considerably more secure than
automatic decryption methods which use that technique.
PGPdaemon make a good effort to avoid being compromised. Future
versions will provide various features to detect and thwart attempts
at tampering.
4) sendpgppass
A small programme which reads the passphrase from the user and
transmits it to PGPdaemon.
5) pgppipe
A simple filter programme which reads in encrypted data and writes
out the decrypted version. It uses PGPdaemon to do the decryption.
6) More information
See the manual pages and the files in the doc directory. The
doc/COMPILING file gives hints for compiling. Well worth reading.
7) Getting PGPsendmail/Unix
The PGPsendmail/Unix Suite is available for anonymous ftp from:
ftp.atnf.csiro.au: pub/people/rgooch
ftp.dhp.com: pub/crypto/pgp/PGPsendmail
ftp.ox.ac.uk: pub/crypto/pgp/utils
linux.nrao.edu: pub/src/pgp/PGPsendmail
For those of you who don't have ftp access, send a blank message to:
slutsky@lipschitz.sfasu.edu
with subject line:
pgpsendmail
and you should receive a copy in the mail.
PGPSendmail/AmigaOS is maintained by Peter Simons
(simons@peti.gun.de). It is available for anonymous
ftp from any Aminet host in: pub/aminet/util/crypt
The main Aminet site is: wuarchive.wustl.edu
There are two files in the PGPsendmail/Unix distribution:
PGPsendmail-vN.n.tar.gz a tar file compressed with gzip which contains
all source code for PGPsendmail version N.n
PGPsendmail-vN.n.tar.gz.sig my signature on above
Inside the compressed tar file, you will find a file: pubkey-rgooch.asc
which contains my public keys:
my work key, for most everything
my home key, for really earth-shattering, die after reading stuff (funny,
no-one has ever used this key: guess I'm not important enough:-)
My public key is also available by issuing the following incantation:
finger rgooch@venice.atnf.csiro.au
****
8) Copyright and Disclaimer
PGPsendmail/Unix and associated software is covered by the GNU
General Public License. See the files: COPYING and COPYING.LIB for
more details.
[CYA mode ON]
An important extract, the disclaimer:
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
[CYA mode OFF]
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