pkzip on vms experience ?

[Thomas Ritter]

Would someone like to share their experience encrypting files with pkzip and sending to non-vms hosts which then must decrypt ?
One of VMS host cannot offer SFTP as a service. We are looking at alternative which must include encryption. Source host is VMS 7.3-2, destination host are none VMS.

[David B Sneddon]

Thomas,

Have you tried it? Did you get errors?
I just tried it going from VMS to MacOS and
it worked fine... I suspect it is a function
of the version of Zip/Unzip rather than a VMS
version issue.

Dave

[Thomas Ritter]

David, I have not tried it yet. Just trying to see if it's worth our while. Save ourselves wasted time, so to speak.

[Steven Schweda]

Real PKZIP as in http://www.pkware.com/ , or
Info-ZIP as in http://www.info-zip.org/ ?

Note:

http://www.pkware.com/documents/announcements/EOL_OpenVMS.pdf

The encryption currently offered in the
Info-ZIP programs is generally considered to
be pretty weak. There is some hope for
improvement there, but it's not available
yet.

What's more important, using Zip encryption,
or actual data security? GnuPG and PGP are
almost certainly much more secure, and are
widely available.

[Mike Smith_33]

We have been using it for years here. I just double checked with the payroll app guys and they use it nightly to zip files which are then ftped to windows and unzipped there.

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

sftp is available for OpenVMS with TCP/IP Services and with other IP stacks (so I must assume there is some other issue left unstated), and other options here include a firewall and external (to OpenVMS) assistance with data link encryption; a VPN, either directly into OpenVMS itself, or into a private and controlled LAN with the OpenVMS box. (This might sound fancy, but it amounts to sticking a VPN-capable firewall in front of the OpenVMS box.)

zip and unzip work just fine on OpenVMS, though I can't say I've had much experience with zip-based encryption across a mixture of hosts. It's weak crypto, but Info-Zip does claim its portable.

http://www.info-zip.org/FAQ.html#crypto

As for weak crypto, crypto is a continuum and the strength really depends on what (or who) you are protecting the data against.

zip 3 and unzip 6 are in test, and kits are reportedly available at:
ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/OLD/beta/
Also see http://freshmeat.net/projects/zip/

zip 3 and unzip 6 also get up multi-gigabyte support; files and zips above 4 GB. And yes, gzip is certainly an option -- if you're not transferring OpenVMS native-file formats; just stream or stream LF or block-oriented files. (Info-Zip is better at managing OpenVMS file formats.)

I do not know off-hand what is arriving with the next versions, but AES would not surprise me.

With V8.2 and later, encryption is licensed with OpenVMS, and with V8.3 and later the encryption is built in, and AES support added. Google certainly finds discussions that reference AES patches for zip and unzip. (These "download advertising sites" are really clogging up Google, too. Ugh. Ten zillion sites serving stale versions, and no links to the real distro sites.)

Conceivably, you could zip the data, and then use AES to encrypt. But for various potential uses, generic existing low-grade zip encryption might well be sufficient.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs