Re: [ISN] PGP's 6.0: Cat Out of the Bag

From: mea culpa (jerichoat_private)
Date: Mon Sep 07 1998 - 02:44:45 PDT

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    Reply From: Raj Mathur <rajuat_private>


PGP 5.0 was legally exported from the US. Apparently US laws forbid
the export of crypto /software/ but not the export of books which have 
source code of crypto software. The authors of PGP 5.0 published a
book with complete source code, and (get this!) checksums of each line 
of code. The book was (legally) exported from the US, the source code
was scanned and OCR'd and the checksums of each line matched with the
original checksums in the book. Once all errors were fixed, voila! PGP 
had been exported from the US!

All this is pretty well documented in the PGP 5.0 documents, and it
wouldn't surprise me to learn that a similar method had been used for
6.0 (did they have enough time to publish the source in a book and
export it?) I need to download the International version of PGP 6.0
and check it out, I guess.

-- Raju

    Chris> How fast does software that shouldn't be exported from US
    Chris> shores get exported anyway?  So fast, the company that
    Chris> makes it hasn't even announced the software's existence.

    Chris> That's what happened to the latest version of Pretty Good
    Chris> Privacy(PGP)'s freeware Wednesday, when the author of a Web
    Chris> site in England posted the software for download.
    Chris> PGPfreeware 6.0 is a software utility that uses a form of
    Chris> strong encryption to scramble data, such as email messages,
    Chris> into unreadable code.

-o-
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