Re: Cryptography for Boost. +1!

From: degski (degski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-02-28 16:53:33

On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 17:49, Rainer Deyke via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> In my example, I don't know or care which how the encrypted zip files
> were generated.  Could be WinZip or PKZip, both of which are closed
> source.

Yes, a good way to decrypt it is then to use PkZip.
 You do realize that PKZip has supported encrypted (aka

> password-protected) zip files since 1993, right?
>

That's just slightly before the rest of the world stopped using it (like
much better things like .arc, .lh, .arj etc etc, compression was a big
thing in the 80's and 90's for obvious reasons).

Do you really think Boost has to cater for this kind of situations (some
nut-case with a pkzip file. I would do a one time unzip with pkzip, and
re-zip with lzma or something of that kind), while earlier today, the
suggestion of having a signed size_type is readily rejected. I doubt there
are many even bigger nut-cases that still keep generating pkzip-archies in
2020)?

Normally these are one-time problems, which need a quick simple (possibly
inefficient) one-time solution (creating some shell command to unzip (and
re-zip) a list of file with pkzip, or something of the kind). Time is
money, no matter what you take to write in C++, it will need debugging
(could be long, old file-formats, you are now trying to find the bugs in a
27-year old application, I'm sure the boss will think that was time well
spent). In a previous life, I was an FD (CFO) of a business unit in a
multinational, and I have managed 2 big implementation of SAP/R3. In Europe
I was getting results much faster than my counter-parts in the other
countries of the EU, by just hiring some temps (cheap, as many as you like
to have at one time) to do the keying (of old data) and make the
book-keepers do the checking of the input. It saved mega on consultancy
fees (at the time about EUR4K/day, vs E10/day for the temp) and got the job
done, it's not beautiful and everybody moaned when I decided that, but two
weeks later we had happy faces all over the place. The pkzip-situation is
similar.

degski
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