Bouncing to crypto world domination

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/81C6D22BFE0CED13CA256E5E007FF2BA>

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Bouncing to crypto world domination

 Friday 02, April 2004

 By Simon Sharwood

Need to know

An Australian-made open source project is set to become one of the world's
leading cryptography tools. This article is featured in APC April 2004
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Originally created in 2000 by the Legion of the Bouncy Castle, a group of
four Melbourne programmers, Bouncy Castle is a set of cryptography APIs for
Java. Frustrated by US restrictions on the export of cryptography
technology, the Legion wrote its own toolset so its Java programs could
enjoy the same strong encryption enjoyed by overseas colleagues.

 Jon Eaves, a member of the Legion, said the software provides an open
source implementation of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). The
software supports a host of cryptography standards including X.509, S/MIME,
CMS (PKCS7), OCSP and OpenPGP. Version 1.22, released in February 2004,
added support for the El Gamal public key exchange scheme in the OpenPGP
library as well as providing some extra support for X.509 certificate
creation.

Bouncy Castle competes head on with offerings from RSA and others, but has
beaten out its commercial competitors to find favour with businesses
worldwide.

"We know of a Fortune 500 company in the US which has a team of 20 people
working with Bouncy Castle for its internal projects," said Eaves, who also
has a day job with global system integrator ThoughtWorks. Other open source
cryptography products such as TinySSL use Bouncy Castle's APIs too.

Sun recommends the use of Bouncy Castle in an online tutorial, while the
company's Java forums are littered with hundreds of posts from enthusiastic
users swapping information on how to put the software to work.

A US-based user recently ported the lite version of the Bouncy Castle API
into C#, making Bouncy Castle available to millions of Microsoft
programmers worldwide and offering the possibility of even wider adoption.

Eaves sees the C# port as welcome recognition of the quality of the
software, the effort that goes into it (users have never had to wait more
than four months for a new release) and the need for security tools on all
platforms.

 However, the Legion isn't looking for glory: "We do it because it is an
interesting set of problems to solve, not because we expect to be famous,"
said Eaves.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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