Re: [ciphertool-devel] Upcoming release

[Wart <wa...@ko...>]

On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 13:53, Alex Griffing wrote:
> > I think this is enough of an improvement to warrant a new release.
> 
> I'm willing to help with the windows version if necessary.

That would be really helpful.  The only thing I think we should add to
the Windows installer is an informational pane that tells the user that
they must install Tcl first, with a link to the ActiveTcl download page.

I'm also looking at providing a Debian ".deb" package for ciphertool.  I
installed Debian Linux on a spare hard drive to test this out.

> > Any takers on providing some of this ciphertext?  To
> > make it easy, we could probably just use the same plaintext string
> > encrypted with different cipher algorithms.
> 
> I've included a list of single-line messages that I've been using for 
> monoalphabetic cryptanalysis testing.  These are supposed to be short, 
> not maliciously constructed, content-neutral, and in the public domain.  
> Maybe they could be of use somewhere in ciphertool.  Longer text items 
> could be needed for ciphertext-only analysis of messages encoded by 
> stronger methods.  In any case I'm fine with the inclusion of ciphertext 
> not holding up the ciphertool release.

Thanks.  I'll pick a long one from your list and encrypt it using
various techniques (aristocrat, bifid, vigenere) for the ciphertool
samples.

I'd rather include the ciphertext, just so that users have a starting
point when they first use the GUI.  The included ciphertext doesn't
necessarily have to be the same as the "standard reference ciphertext"
that we will want later on.

> I'm also interested in finding a longer list of public domain quotes or 
> sayings like these.  I couldn't find any in project gutenberg, and the 
> other sources I found were non-public-domain collections.  I created the 
> short list here mostly from various proverbs.

I probably won't get to work on the release until this weekend.  I've
got some non-ciphertool work that has priority.

--Mike