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Diffstat (limited to 'security/ccrypt/pkg-descr')
| -rw-r--r-- | security/ccrypt/pkg-descr | 22 |
1 files changed, 22 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/security/ccrypt/pkg-descr b/security/ccrypt/pkg-descr new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..299ef745557e --- /dev/null +++ b/security/ccrypt/pkg-descr @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +ccrypt is a utility for encrypting and decrypting files and streams. It was +designed to replace the standard unix crypt utility, which is notorious for +using a very weak encryption algorithm. ccrypt is based on the Rijndael +cipher, which is the U.S. government's chosen candidate for the Advanced +Encryption Standard (AES, see http://www.nist.gov/aes/). This cipher is +believed to provide very strong security. + +Unlike unix crypt, the algorithm provided by ccrypt is not symmetric, i.e., +one must specify whether to encrypt or decrypt. The most common way to invoke +ccrypt is via the commands ccencrypt and ccdecrypt. There is also a ccat +command for decrypting a file directly to the terminal, thus reducing the +likelihood of leaving temporary plaintext files around. In addition, there +is a compatibility mode for decrypting legacy unix crypt files. + +Encryption and decryption depends on a keyword (or key phrase) supplied by +the user. By default, the user is prompted to enter a keyword from the +terminal. Keywords can consist of any number of characters, and all characters +are significant (although ccrypt internally hashes the key to 256 bits). +Longer keywords provide better security than short ones, since they are less +likely to be discovered by exhaustive search. + +WWW: http://quasar.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~selinger/ccrypt/ |