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