This article originally appeared in the September 1996 issue of Mobile Office.

For Your Eyes Only
Mobile Office, September 1996 (now Mobile Computing)
by Peter D. Varhol

Summary of Mobile Office article:

Three cross-platform encryption packages that secure laptop files and e-mail were tested. The tests focused on comprehensiveness of features, ease of installation and use, and performance while encrypting and decrypting files.

SecretAgent was judged to be the most comprehensive of the three packages reviewed, offering a good balance between encryption for e-mail and local file protection. The article pointed out SecretAgent's considerable flexibility in terms of its encryption technology, supporting eight different encryption options, along with bin-hex encoding and data compression. SecretAgent is also enabled for various tokens and hardware.

AT&T SecretAgent Version 3

Score: 
Excellent feature set 
Support for digital signatures 
Several encryption algorithms 
Good balance between e-mail and local file encryption 
Poor documentation

RSA Secure 1.1

Score: 
Highly integrated with File Manager 
Easy and convenient to use 
Fast encryption and decryption 
Not really designed for encrypting e-mail 
Can't be used with alternative Windows File Managers 
No support for Windows 95/NT

ViaCrypt PGP for Windows 4.0

Score: 
Same package runs on all Windows platforms 
Support for digital signatures 
Limited support for encrypting local files