LPM: Encryption Question

[Frank Price]

On Tue, 21 Dec 1999, Janine Ladick wrote:

# > What qualifies as 'by eye undisquised'?
#
# A customer service representative can decode it without calling me 
# on the phone or sending me an email!

Do you really need a CSR to be able to do it by "hand"?  This seems
fraught with peril :-)

If you had a secure web server, and the CSRs had web access, then you
could have a script which would encrypt this special ID.  You start with the
special ID, encrypt it, add to mailing label.  If it comes back, you
send to CSR.  CSR gets enters encrypted number into secure web form
which returns special ID.

A problem with this is that it requires an algorithm that can go from
plaintext -> ciphertext -> plaintext, so you can't use something like
the Unix crypt method.  But maybe that's not such a big deal...

-Frank.
____							  ____
Frank Price					fprice at mis.net
  Linux: the choice of a GNU generation -|- Why not go mad?