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From: adacrypt on 17 Jun 2010 02:58
For whatever it may be worth to any reader – in security of
information an out-of-office user may be a business person, a
diplomat, military person or whatever but the need in every case is
the same and is twofold i.e. they need a secure communications
facility to email home sensitive information accumulated during a trip
or the secure storage of sensitive data within the computer, that can
only be provided by encryption of the data that they accumulate during
a trip. They may wish to secure this information should their laptop
computer or whatever be stolen, the loss of the computer is the least
of their worries in that event usually.

The ciphers to hand are written in Ada-95 and operate from a stick of
removable memory in a USB port. The compiler is installed within the
computer but the cipher remains on board the pen drive in the USB
port.

An advantage of using a pen drive like this is that because it alone
contains the cipher then the compiler reads and writes to the pen
drive only and thus bye-passes the computer hard-drive proper. A
benefit of this mode of operation is that the plaintext for encryption
does not get into the hard drive and the danger of leaving residual
impressions on the hard drive that may be recovered as information by
cryptanalysts using forensic means is obviated. (I would welcome any
advanced information from more expert readers on this point)

The characters for encryption are encrypted one at a time so that each
character over-writes the previous one in RAM and in the computer CPU
and again no impressions are left inside the computer that an
adversary who steals the person’s laptop may use to get the sensitive
information being protected.

This customised crypto scheme is not peculiar to Ada-95 alone but the
only ciphers to hand at present that do this are written in Ada-95 -
it is the method that is under focus here - adacrypt
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