Kiwi Quick Start

Index

About this document
Files included with Kiwi
Example of using Kiwi

About this document

This is a quick start guide, geared towards experienced users of the Unix operating system. More detailed instructions are in the file Start.html.

Files included with Kiwi

example_kiwirc

This file needs to be copied to your home directory and given the filename .kiwirc. This file tells the Kiwi software whether you have a sendmail or qmail system, the location of your mail spool and/or the address you want to forward "good" mail to, the log file to use, the encryption key, and the password so friends can email you without needing to know an encrypted cookie. You also need to decide on whether to forward "good" mail on, or append it to a mailbox you specify.

secpass

Located in the directory tools, secpass is used to generate a random key for the encryption, to be placed in the kiwi_key field in .kiwirc (using cut and paste). This program will only run on an operating system with /dev/random support, and with a copy of the perl interpreter in /usr/bin/perl. Any modern Linux distribution will have /dev/random support and perl located at /usr/bin/perl.

clicrypt

Depending on how this is run, this gives you cookies which timeout after a certain number of days, an encrypted 28-bit IP subnet, or a five-letter message.

When run with no arguments, you are given three cookies: One which times out (by default) in three days, one which times out in two weeks (this one is usually used for Usenet postings), and one which times out after 90 days.

Example: clicrypt

You can change the timeout values by varying kiwi_days_short, kiwi_days_mid, and kiwi_days_long in your .kiwirc file.

If you send out an email with the return address name+cookie@domain.com (or name-cookie@domain.com on Qmail systems), the email address will time out.

To encrypt an IP subblock, either set up the 'REMOTE_ADDR' environmental variable (or run it as a SSI on most web servers) or give it an IP on the command line. Details on using ipcrypt on an SSI-enabled web browser are in the file Webmailto.html.

Example: clicrypt 127.0.0.1

This program can also be used to encrypt a five-letter message, typically used for subscribing to announce mailing lists, or to give to people of marginal trust.

Example: clicrypt abcde

decode

This will tell you the contents of a given cookie. To use, simply run it, type in the cookie and hit return.

infilter

This is the program you would place in .forward (or .qmail and .qmail-default on qmail systems) that determines if a message was sent to a valid cookie (or has the correct password in the email address), and if so, either appends your mailbox with the message in question, or forwards it to another email address you have. If the cookie was rejected, then it discards the message and makes a note in your maillog file.

A cookie will be rejected if the cookie does not decrypt to valid data (a randomly generated cookie has a 1 in 113 chance of being considered valid data), or if the time stamp in the decrypted cookie has expired.

If kiwi_password is defined in .kiwirc, and someone sends mail with the password in place of the encrypted cookie in the address, the message will be accepted. This is useful for giving personal friends an easy to remember email address. Care must be taken that the email address with the password does not fall in to spammers' hands.

wrapper

This is a sendmail wrapper, which will append a 90-day timeout cookie to your return address in all outgoing mail you send. The procedure for using this wrapper to send out mail instead of sendmail depends on your client. If using Pine, add a line like this to your .pinerc file:

sendmail-path=/usr/local/bin/wrapper -t