linux

[Marc Salomon]

<URL:http://www.cygnus.com/~gnu/swan.html>

My project for 1996 is to secure 5% of the Internet traffic against passive
wiretapping. If we get 5% this year, we can secure 20% next year, against both
active and passive attacks; and 80% in 1998. Soon the whole Internet will be
 private and secure. Want to help?

The idea is to deploy boxes that will sit between your local area network and
the Internet (near your firewall or router) which opportunistically encrypt
your Internet packets. Whenever you talk to a machine (like a Web site) that
doesn't support encryption, your traffic goes out "in the clear" as usual.
Whenever you connect to a machine that does support this kind of encryption,
this box automatically encrypts all your packets, and decrypts the ones that
come in. In effect, each packet gets put into an "envelope" on one side of the
net, and removed from the envelope when it reaches its destination. This works
for all kinds of Internet traffic, including Web access, Telnet, FTP, IRC,
Usenet, etc.

The US government would like to control the deployment of IP Security with the
crypto export laws. This isn't a problem for my effort, because the
cryptographic work is happening outside the United States. A foreign
philanthropist has donated the resources required to add these protocols to the
Linux operating system. Linux is a complete, freely available operating system
for IBM PC's and several kinds of workstation, which is compatible with Unix.
It was written by Linus Torvalds, and is still maintained from Finland, by a
talented team of expert programmers working all over the world and coordinating
over the Internet. Linux is distributed under the GNU Public License, which
gives everyone the right to copy it, improve it, give it to their friends, sell
it commercially, or do just about anything else with it, without paying anyone
for the privilege.

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