mail encryption/decryption

[John B. Chambers]

> > Is is possible to use crypt with mail?  THe experience I've had says no.
> > Our guru has gone off to greener pastures.
> > 
> >  john salmi    {ihnp4,mgnetp}!dicomed!john
> >  dicomed corp
> >  minneapolis
> > 
> 
>  You cannot directly mail encrypt files. Mail(1) (AT&T's at least) will
> strip out all NUL characters before sending mail. So if crypt(1) generates
> any NULs the person receiving that mail will not be able to decrypt it
> correctly even with the correct key.
> 
> You'll have to write two programs: One to replace NULs with someother character
> sequence before mailing.  And another that puts the NULs back in to the file
> after reading that sequence.   The same goes if you want to mail cpio(1) type
> files.
> 
> 	Brian Walden
> 	AT&T-Bell Labs
> 	...!ihnp4!whuts!bsw



You should be able to adequately adapt uuencode and uudecode for the purposes
of transmission, but I certainly wouldn't rely on crypt(1) to protect anything 
I really treasured.
-- 

John B. Chambers, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp., Austin, TX
{ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!mcc-db!jbc, jbc at ut-sally.ARPA, chambers at mcc.ARPA