Compression and Encryption

[Dave Cragg]

At 8:36 am -0500 8/1/04, Ray Horsley wrote:
>Thanks for your reply, Brian.  I, too, found the mcEncrypt to be
>undocumented.  The way I learned of it is through studying Metacard's "Ask
>Dialog" stack.  If you specify "ask password" it encrypts the user's data.
>Short of writing my own encryption/decryption scheme, I may decide to use
>base64encode and decode functions of Metacard which uses the base64 (RFC
>2045) wherever that comes from, although this doesn't reduce the size of the
>data, and it actually appears to increase it somewhat.  Let me know if you
>can think of any other problems using base64encode.

base64 is not an encryption scheme. It encodes data into a format 
suitable for transport over e-mail gateways, basically by only using 
standard printable ASCII values. It does this by spreading 3 bytes of 
data over 4 bytes which accounts for the one third increase in data 
size.

So if you need to encrypt your data to keep it secret, don't use base64.

RunRev has just announced industrial strength encryption in an 
upcoming release. If you can't wait till then, you may have to roll 
your own.

Cheers
Dave