Suggested kerneli changes

["Adam J. Richter" <adam@yggdrasil.com>]

	I would like to suggest the following kerneli changes, which
I am willing to implement if contributions from a US citizen are
considered OK by the kerneli maintainer, and if the reaction to them
is generally positive.

	1. I want to make the Initial Value change that I described in
	   my previous email so that the IV is independent of both
	   machine page size and device block size.

	2. I want to change cryptoapi so that loop devices can be
	   configued by ioctl's that use strings rather that cipher
	   ID's and that allow for information like key length to
	   be retrieved by the ioctl.  That way user level programs
	   like losetup will not have to be updated to reflect the
	   specific set of ciphers available in the kernel cryptoapi
	   patch, and the kernel could automatically try to load the
	   cipher-foo module when it is asked to configure an unknown
	   cipher "foo" (with the usual precaustions about bogus
	   module names).  It should be easier to get the smaller change
	   accepted in util_linux.

	3. I want to separate the resulting core cryptoapi code
	   from the ciphers.  The cryptoapi core would then be more
	   manageable patch, which we should campaign to get included
	   into the standard Linux kernels.  The ciphers could be
	   distributed as one or more separate packages that could
	   build as standalone modules without needing to patch
	   the kernel.

	Does this plan look OK?

Adam J. Richter     __     ______________   4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
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Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
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