Subject: encryption
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 12:06:23 CDT
I have been browsing through the users list and one of the requests
there was for adding encryption to the AW document.
This would be very easy, as Dom pointed out on the users list, but
there are several issues to be considered. Most importantly, strong
encryption is illegal in some countries, and is subject to
(ridiculous) export regulations in the US; in essence we could not
distribute source or binaries from a US based server, and probably
could run into dificulties even if we used a non-US server. Thus I do
not think we should even consider adding encryption to the official
sources or binaries. I felt the legal implications needed to be
pointed out in the light of the request on the users list.
I do think though that having the capability to encrypt AW
documents would be useful, and would be happy to implement this
as a patch, when I have the time. I think the best solution would be
to create a separate file type, where everything between the
<abiword> tags would be encrypted; it could be called ebw, abwe,
or something like that. If anyone would like to discuss any of the
cryptographic issues involved, we can do it off the list, since it is
probably not going to be of interest to most people on the list.
Tomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Apr 23 2001 - 12:07:47 CDT