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Security Businesses Apple

CryptoHeaven Available For Mac OS X 20

Mark0 writes "In an article on MacCentral we read 'CryptoHeaven beefs up Mac OS X support'. This is great news for the Mac OS X community as there aren't many competing applications for the new platform. CryptoHeaven seems to be leading the secure email sector and also provides instant messaging and file storage!" You can never have too much security! Well, OK, you can, but CryptoHeaven looks kinda neat.
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CryptoHeaven Available For Mac OS X

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  • Wow... Cryptoheaven sure is great. Now I don't have to mess around with OS X Mail client [colorado.edu], or use bad Mac ports of Windows IM products [messenger.msn.ca].
    I believe there's a huge market for a product like this.
    On another note, doing some research, I found that there were several interesting ways of achieving secure e-mail connections in OS X [allpar.com].
  • Another option... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Quicksilver31337 ( 541929 ) <kariudo@g m a il.com> on Thursday August 15, 2002 @07:51AM (#4076003) Journal
    For those that are happy with the Apple Mail client then their is another popular crypto solution to protect your privacy. PGP, you know it, it is available in the form of GPG (the GNU Privacy Guard) and there is currently a rather well developed set of tools for Mac OS X (Here. [sourceforge.net]) Including the GPG base, and addons to Mail.app so u can easily encrypt and decrypt your mail using the wide PGP standard.
    • Re:Another option... (Score:4, Informative)

      by tbmaddux ( 145207 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @08:08AM (#4076089) Homepage Journal
      GPG covers the email. For files, there is also PuzzlePalace [tds.net] which provides a GUI front-end to OpenSSL (included in MacOS X). $15 shareware but it won't nag you. While you're there, get a copy of BrickHouse and turn on your firewall.

      Or you can just use Apple's Disk Copy to create AES-encrypted and password-protected disk volumes. Just be sure not to put the password in your Keychain (it's selected to do that by default when it prompts for a password at mount). It's free and already installed with MacOS X.



      • Right, because if you put it in your keychain, then its only protected by an easy to guess single password, right?

        Has anyone tried making the keychain itself better protected? (Say, putting IT on an AES partition) or putting it on a removable USB keychain drive?

        (And then encrypting it with PGP or something.)

        I've considered doing this, but haven't had a chance to experiment -- I wonder if OS X can handle the keychain being somewhere other than ~/Library/Keychain, like /Volumes/Toyota/?

      • I use GPG for encrypting files as well.

        for example
        gpg -ear me@myaddr.com < private.file >private.asc
        This encrypts (e) the file to me (r "receiver", specified by the email address) and saves it in ascii text format (a). Later if I want to decrypt (d) the file:
        gpg -d private.asc
        (then enter passphrase)

        pretty simple

        as for a GUI solution...? I think it would be simple to make some system services or applescripts or something to wrap that functionality, but i dunno
    • Does GPG use a framework bundle yet, or is it still suck in /usr?

      A framework is a lot easier to manage especially since I can put it in my own ~/Library/Frameworks/
      • There is a GPGME Framework (GPGME being the preferred way to access the functionality of GPG).

        Point your browser to http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and download the GPGME.Framework.

        • "access the functionality of"?!

          So it's just a shim? That defeats the whole point |-p

          Also, when the hell is GPG going to use CDSA, multiple keychains suck
          • So it's just a shim? That defeats the whole point

            It's supposed to be a shim. It provides all the APIs and everything you'd want (encryption, decryption, signing, signature verification and key management) and the engine (being GPG) could easily be swapped out for something else. If you don't like it though, take it up with Werner. The argument of whether or not the functions should be directly accessible via a library have been argued to death in the various newsgroups/mailing lists...

            • That pretty much kills any interest I could have had with GPG.

              OS X has a trust framework which ought to be used or else it's just a 5th wheel. If I wanted Linux chaos I would use it.
  • by arson1 ( 527855 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @08:54AM (#4076405) Homepage
    And I've been pleasantly suprised by the nice set of features, and the speed... especially considering the fact that it is a Java application.

    File transfer/encryption is a one click process, my only complaint is that I only get 2MB of storage for free... you can pay for more though
    • by b_pretender ( 105284 ) on Thursday August 15, 2002 @09:18AM (#4076564)
      From the article: "You can never have too much security!"

      I don't know if this is true or not. I know that the proper amount of security is such that the expense of breaking the encryption is greater than the value of the message for every point in the future. This doesn't have an upper bound. The only factor that comes into play is convenience of the security procedures. Too much security sometimes relates to an inconvenient policies.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, crypto to be safe... as long as I keep paying the "$2.42/mo ... less than a cup of coffee a week!"

    And what will I do with all my secure data once Cryptoheaven dot bombs itself?

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