Freely Distributable Algorithm for security

[Jon Hall]

[Seeing that we had so much of a discussion on security and secure systems
this week, some refreshing news from Lucent (nee Bell Labs)]

md
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A Development in Security Software
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 6b  A group of Bell Labs computer researchers will
describe new network security software on Wednesday intended to protect
personal digital information and increase security when connecting to
remote computers and Web sites.

The technology, designed for individual and corporate use, is
significant because it does not require the centralized structure now
necessary with many existing software security systems. Moreover, it
could become a widely used and free alternative to similar software
that is being developed by companies like Microsoft and Sun
Microsystems.

The two programs, Factotum and Secure Store, will be described in a
technical paper to be given by the researchers at the Usenix computer
security conference scheduled to begin on Wednesday in San Francisco.
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The researchers said they had solved the problem of storing a diverse
collection of personal informationb  like user names, passwords and
digital network credentialsb  used to identify computer users to online
merchants and other electronic services.

The researchers at Bell Labs, part of Lucent Technologies, have
previously developed an operating system known as Plan 9, which is
freely available as an open source program. They have also written the
two complimentary security programs so that they can be easily
converted for other operating systems, like Windows, Macintosh or
Unix.


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Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(SM)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org

Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

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