🚀 go-pugleaf

dla@athena (Don Alvarez) writes:

> >1) Modify PGP so that it only generates a small number of secondary keys.
> >   Since the user is unaware of what key is used, he/she would never know.

> If you are going to allow the bad guy to modify the user's copy of PGP
> (or any other encryption routine), then of course the bad guy can win.

Now comes the paranoid question. How do we know that our copy of PGP
has not been modified in the way suggested by the original poster? I
have never seen the program and its sources authenticated by its
authors...

> Forget PGP for the moment, and assume that you just have a generic
> routine with access to the plaintext (your text editor, for example).
> If you can't trust the routine, then you can never be confident that
> the plaintext wasn't written to a file, inserted into a virus for
> floppy-based distribution, squirted out through a modem while the
> keyboard and phone were idle, or whatever.  I know your proposal

True, but I have not got my text editor from an ftp site and it is not
advertised to be able to do public key encryption, which makes it a
less tempting target for the subversion you are suggesting...

Regards,
Vesselin
-- 
Vesselin Vladimirov Bontchev          Virus Test Center, University of Hamburg
Tel.:+49-40-54715-224, Fax: +49-40-54715-226      Fachbereich Informatik - AGN
< PGP 2.0 public key available on request. > Vogt-Koelln-Strasse 30, rm. 107 C
e-mail: bontchev@fbihh.informatik.uni-hamburg.de    D-2000 Hamburg 54, Germany