Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Cryptographic primitives

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From: dheitmueller <dheitmueller@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 22:12:21 -0500 (EST)
Quoting Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx>:

>  Has someone had a look at the latest linux sources
> (2.5.47)? I think they contain quite a few cryptographic funtions
> (but haven't looked myself).

I took a quick look a couple weeks ago, and what I understand they are implemented in-kernel, and either written from scratch or ported from other GPL sources.  You can browse their CVS at http://cvs.kerneli.org/

Looking at the available ciphers, it looks like they have some of the newer ciphers (for example AES, RC5, twofish), but lack some of the necessary ciphers for Samba (i.e. MD4, RC4).  

If I had to guess, MD4 was excluded because it is not considered secure (collision attacks) and they want to discourage new applications.  RC4 is a stream cipher, while the rest are block ciphers.  Since the architecture is geared to encrypting kernel buffers, I suspect RC4 is not readily compatible with their implementation.  Of course, I'm not a cryptographer.

I didn't mean to start trouble by asking about this.  I'm just trying to get Ethereal working with crypto, and OpenSSL seems to be the best technical choice.  I didn't know it had been discussed previously (my fault for not checking the archives).

Devin Heitmueller
Senior Software Engineer
Netilla Networks Inc