🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <adamsd.715442992@crash> adamsd@crash.cts.com (Adams Douglas) writes:

>[...] Wordperfect 5.1 is easily broken.
>Why is it so easily crackable?  Were they just lazy, or what?

Suppose they had used DES.  The same people who regularly forget that
they used their first name as their login password will forget that
they used the name of the file as the encryption key.  Now their
100 page annual report is completely lost, with no hope of ever
getting it back.

Suppose they use some nothing idiot encryption like rot-13.  Most
people in a given office probably don't know how to crack it, so it
provides reasonable security.  When the user forgets the key, however,
it *is* possible to find a way to recover the data.

Very few MIS departments would want to hand every secretary in the
company an unrecoverable encryption option in a word processor.
The damage it would inevitably do when the users forget their keys six months
from now would generally far outweigh the security benefits in the mean time.
A few people at a few companies may really need DES, and if they do
they can go out and get a third party encryption package.  

-don alvarez