12 July 1998


From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 05:04:19 (NZST)
To: aucrypto@suburbia.net
Subject: AUCRYPTO: cryptlib public beta released


I've just released a public beta of my encryption library, 

   http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/cryptlib/  

As well as the usual encryption options it's always had, it now supports 
certificate handling (X.509v3, PKIX, SET, and every imaginable variation 
and mutation of the above), attribute certificates, CRL's, and other bits 
and pieces.  So far the betas haven't been publicised much, but I thought 
I'd make this one public because I'd like feedback from users of various 
OS's which I don't have easy access to (for those who haven't seen it 
before, it supports a wide variety of algorithms, many implemented in 
assembly language for extra speed, digital signatures, key exchange, key 
generation, management, and a key database interface, etc etc etc, and 
comes with a fairly comprehensive 180-page users manual). 

You can get the beta as 

   ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/crypt/cryptlib/beta/beta0709.zip

the manual from the same location as 

   ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/crypt/cryptlib/beta/manual.pdf

and precompiled binaries for Windows as 

   ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/crypt/cryptlib/beta/beta_bin.zip 

(although the real point of the beta is that you play with the source code 
rather than just grabbing some binaries).  Please don't mirror this, the 
site's probably somewhat slow but I'd rather not have a pre-release beta
appearing all over the place.

What I'm particularly interested in is getting a wider variety of key 
database interfaces going.  cryptlib can use any type of SQL database as a
key database, but since I can't port it to every database engine in 
existence (more because of the fact that I don't have access to them all 
than because of the difficulty involved, it's fairly simple to do), in many
cases the code is only a sketch of what's needed.  What's currently 
partially supported is BSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, Raima Velocis, and 
Solid, I'd be interested in having these finished up.  Fully supported 
(the last time I checked) were only mSQL (Unix) and generic ODBC (Windows).

This version includes a new bignum library, the asm bignum support for some 
Unix platforms (the Alpha and Irix spring to mind) is currently a bit broken, 
so you'll have to compile without asm or wait for the next release.  In 
addition the keygen code is replaced by stubs for the same reason, if you 
really need keys you can get around this for now by using the ability to read 
PGP private key files.

Peter.