I have received very similar enquiries when discussing things with Bible Societies and Translation Agencies.
This is really several distinct topics rolled up into one, but which should really be distinguished from one another. - Provenance = ensuring that the text used by CrossWire to make a SWORD module has a demonstrable and traceable correspondance to that published by the copyright owner. - Authenticity = ensuring that users can verify that the text they have as a SWORD module is really identical to what was published by CrossWire. - Security = ensuring that communication protocols are not compromised such that third parties can intercept and understand, and even modify information that should remain private to sender and recipient. - Copy-protection = mechanisms to prevent copying of "locked content" for copyrighted works. Encryption primarily tackles the security topic, but also has a bearing on the authenticity topic, but not in the same manner. Certification primarily tackles the authenticity topic, but also relies on cryptographic techniques. As for CrossWire, not yet using a paid for certification authority like Verisign, we leave some of our operations open to interference by malicious third parties. We ourselves trust one another, as we would expect to do as an open-source community of volunteers working together to achieve shared goals. Do we recognise that being in a spiritual warfare, the enemies of the Word of God may stoop to all manner of craftiness and deceipt to undo or undermine our work? Solutions to the fourth topic are likely to be expensive to implement in such a way that reverse engineering of the methods is rendered improbably difficult compared to the resources available in the timespan of the universe. After all the music/entertainment industry is spending huge sums to protect their revenue stream, and they still get cracked by the ingenious. I guess many of us are not so well read on computer security issues and related topics as we are on computer programming and Bible software. For informative and entertaining insights into these things, I recommend folk listen to the weekly podcasts by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte on Security Now! available at http://grc.com/ http://grc.com/ -- David -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/encryption-and-integrity-checking.-tp22451086p22455372.html Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: [email protected] http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
