LXNY General Meeting:

Jay Sulzberger
will speak on
Successes and Failures of Mass Free Cryptography


Tuesday 3 October 2000

LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 3 October 2000.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

In particular, all members of FBUNY, NYLUG, LUNY!, AnyNIX, the Brooklyn Bunch, the Upstate Alliance, and all other Free Software Groups are welcome!

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm and runs until 9:00 pm.
Enter the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and ask at the front desk for the room number.

At exactly 9:00 pm many members will repair to our traditional place of refreshment.

Arnold Reinhold, in

http://ciphersaber.gurus.com

tells of the Way of Free Software:

In George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Jedi Knights were expected to make their own light sabers. The message was clear: a warrior confronted by a powerful empire bent on totalitarian control must be self-reliant.

GNUPG is the GNU implementation of the OpenPGP protocol stack, a near and direct descendant of the original Pretty Good Privacy email privacy system of Phil Zimmermann.

I will present a system for using GNUPG for the following case:

Alice and Bob know each other and may communicate by telephone. The telephone link may be tapped. Alice and Bob have in the past communicated by email, and may communicate today by email. Their past emails were not encrypted, and the email link might have been tapped then, and it may be tapped today.

Alice and Bob wish now to enter upon a more private correspondence. That is, they want email between them, from today forward, to be decently encrypted.

The method I will present is non-standard in the PGP community. I invite experienced and inexperienced users and designers and crackers of crypto-systems, including PGP systems, to attack the method and its rationale.