[Preston] Reading an encrypted file from a windows machine

[James Green]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:26:34PM +0100, Dougie Nisbet wrote:

> Another thought I had was zipping it up on linux PC then scp'ing to the 
> windows PC. I've not investigating whether I can zip  something with a 
> password, and whether winzip can unzip it. 

I'm not sure how paranoid you are about this, but given you were using
gpg before, I assume at least somewhat. Hence I should point out that
zip encryption is reported to be *really*, *really*, *REALLY* shoddy and
weak. I haven't tested this myself, but I suggest if you care enough to
be encrypting this data, you try running some of the tools at
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/cryptanalysis/ over your encrypted zip
file before trusting it to be at all secure.

Are there not PGP-like things for Windows that will do what you want?
I've not looked, really, having not used Windows for a while now. A
friend of mine swears by BestCrypt (http://www.jetico.com/) -- then
again, he's firmly convinced that various UK and/or US government
agencies have backdoors to crack PGP, so I'm not sure how seriously I'd
take his opinions :-)

Hope this helps,

James.
-- 
jkg((-.+)?@(|the\.)earth.li|@(jimbo|wonky)\.org\.uk|03u at cs\.nott\.ac\.uk)
Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.
		-- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"
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