Re: unusual startup messages

Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Fri, 1 Nov 1996 20:03:33 -0500 (EST)


>> You've raised an interesting point: once Linus moses to the US,
>> we won't be able to integrate cryptography into the "standard"
>> kernel if Linux is maintained from the U.S. instead of Finland.

Linus can become a US citizen and forget about all those Europeans...

> So which algorithms? Well, there's DES (& 3DES), IDEA, BlowFish,
> MD5, RSA, ... heck include them all, refine later. :)

3DES with alternate S boxes in the middle to make things hard
for all the government agencies with hardware DES crackers.

> Or define the hooks for the drop-ins now. Or something like that.

Hooks are against the law too.

> Lots of packages need cryptography. Perhaps a library? But how would
> the kernel efficiently interface with a library? Is that insane?

Insane but very nice. I think it could be done with the code
in the kernel. User programs can share the code by using a
library stub that uses mmap to get execute access to the kernel
code. For security, there would be a new /proc or /dev entry
that lets normal users mmap a few predefined regions of the
kernel. Swapping that is optional - even more insane, and even
more useful.