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.