[7515] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Self Decrypting Archive in PGP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Salzman, Noah)
Fri Jul 21 11:03:26 2000
Message-ID: <0DA2A15FEE96D31187AA009027AA6A72014BFBFA@ca-exchange1.nai.com>
From: "Salzman, Noah" <Noah_Salzman@NAI.com>
To: Dave Del Torto <ddt@lsd.com>, Ove Espeland <OES@Eiendomsinfo.no>
Cc: "'cryptography@c2.net'" <cryptography@c2.net>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 19:03:50 -0700
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First,
The Unix flavors of PGP E-Business Server 7.0 (fancy name for Command Line,
fancy price too) will support the creation of _Windows-based_ SDAs. PGP 7
is "due out in the near future."
The classic example of the request we get is "we generate our customer's
billing statements on Solaris/AIX/HP-UX and we want to encrypt the files
using PGP and then email them to the customer... but we don't want our
customers to have to install PGP on their Windows machine."
[So you just feel comfortable training people's users to run
executables they get from potentially untrusted sources over the net,
eh? Are you really helping anyone's security here?
Am I the only person left on earth who finds "self-extracting" bundles
to be a menace to security? --Perry]
SDAs may not be desirable by the linux-leaning crypto-savvy folks on this
list, but there is a market for SDAs amongst the unwashed masses using
millions of Windows-only PCs.
[Thanks to which, viruses like Melissa and "ILOVEYOU" have spread
rapidly, causing people like me to have to lose sleep for days trying
to fix the mess. Am I really the only person who cares about this? --Perry]
Second,
"Shouldn't be rocket science." Huh? How do you make a single application
that launches on Windows, Mac, and Unix? (Sorry, java doesn't count.)
--noah@pgp.com--
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Del Torto [mailto:ddt@lsd.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 2:10 PM
To: Ove Espeland
Cc: 'cryptography@c2.net'
Subject: Re: Self Decrypting Archive in PGP
At 9:18 am +0200 2000-07-20, Ove Espeland wrote:
>How do I make a Self Decrypting Archive with the PGP Command line
Ove,
You cannot. SDAs are available in the Windows and Mac GUI clients
only, and they are not x-platform.
X-platform executable self-decryption capability shouldn't be
rocket science.
dave
[This begs the question of whether any self-decryption capability is
ever even desirable... --Perry]
