Why IDEA?

[rau...@gmail.com]

Hi all :))

First of all, thanks for "Safe". Probably it will make my mobile phone
useful (at last...).

This said, why IDEA? I know, it's very secure, but it is patented...
There are non-patented and even more secure (and faster, but this is
not an issue) methods out there, I think. Having a patented algorithm
is not very open source ;), so I think there are any other reasons I
haven't thought of to use IDEA instead of Twofish, or even AES.

Again, thanks a lot for the app :))

Raúl

[Thomas King]

Hi Raúl:
The reason why Safe and SafeDesktop still use IDEA is very poor: until now I
was too lazy to replace IDEA with AES. Back in 2001, when I started
developing Safe AES has not been widely available. 3DES is very time
consuming and DES alone does not provide reasonable security. So, I opted for
IDEA. Nowadays, as you mentioned, mobile devices are fast enough to compute
3DES, and AES is available from many third-party libraries. To switch from
IDEA to AES is only changing a few lines (I guess less than 4 lines) of code
in Safe and SafeDesktop. However, the problem is: how do people migrate their
existing IDEA-encrypted databases to AES-encrypted ones? For this, a tool is
required that does the migration job for the people. This is why I still
hesitate to make the switch.

I already listed a transition from IDEA to AES in the roadmap posted on the
forum. However, at the moment I do not feel high pressure to persue this
topic. This does not mean that any developer who is willing to lend a helping
hand will be dismissed. Far from it! Every developer who provides code will
be highly appreciated. So, do you want to develop such a migration tool?

Cheers,
Thomas