Question 176. What is TIPEM?

TIPEM is a cryptographic Toolkit for Interoperable Privacy-Enhanced Messaging. It is a library that provides the tools for developing secure messaging applications. In addition to electronic mail, TIPEM can be used for secure messaging-based applications, such as electronic commerce, EDI, and electronic forms routing. The Certificate Management Extensions (CME) in TIPEM facilitate issuing, management, and tracking of certificates from within the application.

TIPEM supports the X.509 certificate standards and secure messaging industry standards, such as S/MIME, PKCS#7, PEM, and X.400. It provides the following algorithms:

• RSA Public Key Cryptosystem
• Data Encryption Standard (DES)
• RC2 Variable-Key Size Symmetric Block Cipher (exportable)
• MD2 Hashing Algorithm
• MD5 Hashing Algorithm

TIPEM is written entirely in portable C, and is available on a wide variety of platforms. For more information on TIPEM, see http://www.rsa.com/rsa/prodspec/tipem/tipem-ov.htm