Re: word 97 decryption finally completed

Caolan McNamara (Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie)
Tue, 14 Sep 1999 09:15:27 +0100 (IST)

On 13-Sep-99 Shaw Terwilliger wrote:
>Caolan McNamara wrote:
>> development version 0.5.29 and above of wv at
>> http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/publink/mswordview/development
>> (or in abiword cvs) has this ability built in for conversion of
>> word docs to other formats.
>
>I'm not sure I can be happy about this yet... not that the work isn't
>good or the feature needed, but I don't want to be deemed a criminal
>arms dealer by my government. :)
>
>AbiWord's CVS server is located in a country that prohibits its
>citizens from exporting strong cryptography. The definition of
>"strong" seems to change every day, and I'm neither a crypto expert
>nor a lawyer, so I'm really not sure how or if decryption of a
>stream qualifies as an armament.
>
>Caolan, do you have any pointers to further information on the
>encryption scheme Word is using? I think we have a copy of the
>United States export regulations around the office and I'd
>like to do a quick check.

Fear not, word itself falls underneath the export regulations of
the us. It is 40bit rc4 and as such crackable by the nsa in about
0.2 seconds :-), or about 10 days to the rest of us. The only
issue with it in practice is that rc4 is a tradesecret, while the
rc4 code included with this piece of word is not from rsa itself,
and has been proved to be compatible is has been suggested in the
past that a commercial ogranization using it should but the full
rc4 from rsa itself, but that a freeware program would be ok with
this free version.

The export regs are almost certainly ok, those of us happily living
in the EU (except maybe for France) are fine with just about anything
so you can always make the decryption portion a seperate module downloadable
from euro mirrors, though I think it is unnecessary.

C.

>
>--
>Shaw Terwilliger

Real Life: Caolan McNamara * Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie * Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan * Sig: an oblique strategy
Discard an axiom

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