Re: Cryptography for Boost. +1!

From: Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-02-28 18:30:43

On 28.02.20 17:53, degski via Boost wrote:
> 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)?
Meanwhile zip files are still the single most popular archive format on 
the internet.  Go to the boost download page and you'll find a zip file 
as the "lowest common denominator" download for Windows.  Go to 
https://itch.io/ and you'll find thousands of indie games, the vast 
majority of them packaged as zip.  Download a Java jar file and you'll 
be downloading a zip file with a different extension.  Same with .docx.

Granted, most of these zip files aren't encrypted.  And if I really 
wanted to read from a zip file, I'd use a third-party library like 
libzip or libarchive to do the heavy lifting.  It was just an example to 
demonstrate that there are use cases for specific encryption methods, 
even when those algorithms are known to be method.

(Implementing TLS would be another example, although again one where 
higher-level libraries exist.  Reading obscure encrypted file formats 
would a more compelling example, because there often isn't a readily 
available library around to do the heavy lifting, but the very nature of 
obscure file formats is that they are obscure, i.e. I can't think of any 
off of the top of my head.)

-- 
Rainer Deyke (rainerd_at_[hidden])