Subject: Re: Commit: Password dialog
From: Dom Lachowicz (dominicl@seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 14:16:33 CDT
Quoting Aaron Lehmann <aaronl@vitelus.com>:
> Would you care to elaborate on the reason for this?
>
> I admit that I haven't really been following the list, but my fear is
> that this is for encryption, or even worse: DRM.
Maybe I need to explain myself better.
MSWord documents CAN be password protected. Note that this password is really
easy to crack because of the simple XOR scheme used, but since cracking that
password automatically would probably be a violation of the DMCA or some other
law, we instead try something legal - namely, getting the password from the
user and then authenticating the user using that token.
The DOC Import Filter needs a way to get a password from the user when it
encounters one of these password-protected documents. That's ALL this dialog
is meant for, at least for the time being. To the best of my knowledge,
there's no effort underway to password-protect or encrypt AbiWord documents.
Thomas Frydrych suggested implementing something like this as a plugin maybe
sometime in the future. If you want the effect of an encrypted document right
now, an easy suggestion is to use an external PGP program. And yes, MD5 is
being deprecated in favor of SHA.
Dom
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