USENET newsreaders and cryptography: features/suggestions/questions

[Nickey MacDonald]

On Thu, 8 Jul 1993, Sameer wrote:

> CRYPTOPROGRAM=pgp
> 
> system(strcat(getenv("CRYPTOPROGRAM"), " -m foobar"))
> 
> 	(I'm not well-versed in strcat, so this could be wrong, but you
> know what I mean.)

I know you put a disclaimer, but I'll warn you that the above code is very
dangerous...  strcat() concatenates to its first argument, and the value
returned by getenv is not a suitable argument in this case...  the fix:

char enccmd[100];
strcpy(enccmd, getenv("CRYPTOPROGRAM"));
strcat(enccmd, " -m foobar");
system(enccmd);

However, I still find this unsatisfying, as the'-m' is probably a PGP
sepcific option, and it seems to me that a more general solution would be
either some form of template in the environment variable:

CRYPTOPROGRAM="pgp encode=-e decode= sign=-s stdin=-f text=-t ascii=-a
conventional=-c userid=-u %u forcepager=-m pagemode=-m wipeorig=-w
recoverorigfilename=-p detatchsig=-b leavesigintact=-d adresseelist=%a
...and so on..."

or a set of environment variables, such as:

CRYPTOENCODE=
CRYPTODECODE=
CRYPTOSIGN=
CRYPTOVERIFYSIGNATURE=
...and so on...

Either way is a lot more work, but probably a lot more general as well...
This is a piece of code that only needs to be written once...  would take
more work to do the documentation that the code...  Any takers, or should I
put this on my TODO list as well?

--
Nick MacDonald               | NMD on IRC
i6t4 at jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca  | PGP 2.1 Public key available via finger
i6t4 at unb.ca                  | (506) 457-1931    ^{1024/746EBB 1993/02/23}