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PKWare and Winzip Reach A Secure Zip Compromise

Posted by Hemos on from the kind-of-working-together.-sort-of dept.

richard_za writes "Until now the rival compression software vendors PKWare and Winzip have had different (incompatible) ways of password protecting the ZIP format. In a bid to prevent fragmentation of the standard they have agreed to have their software support opening of the other's files. They have however not agreed to support a single standard. PKZip's encryption is RSA-based while Winzip use an AES approach which is fully documented here. The Register is running this story. PKWare has this press release."

2 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Easy to crack? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Isn't the Winzip encyption one of the lamest around, even by PC standards? I'm sure last time I checked (forgot my password) I was disgusted by how easy it was, and have certainly never used it since. I'd like to use it, however?

  2. gpg or pgp by axxackall · · Score: 1, Troll
    The article was about encryption, not about compression. Both Cgzip and Bzip are compressing, not encrypting.

    But if you need content protection of your archives in Linux, then consider either pgp or gpg (or both - gpg is just a modern and open re-implementation of the famous in the past pgp). I used both and never had any problem.

    --

    Less is more !