On an archaeological kick to read ancient email that I wrote some 20 years ago, I discovered that about a six window archive of my own email was missing. Undaunted, I decided to contact one of my friends, to whom I'd written a fair bit at the time, to see what he had.

Well, he somehow kept what appears to be a complete archive of what I sent him. He thoughtfully used Unix 'crypt' to encrypt it, presumably to keep prying eyes from sorting out what our private messages were about at the time. Needless to say, twenty years later, he's forgotten the encryption key, but he's still got the raw ciphertext and he's absolutely certain that he used Unix crypt.

Today, there are two tools that can break 'crypt' encryption. unixcrypt-breaker is point-and-shoot, clearly identifying a good bit of plaintext, but not enough to actually read it. It's clear where there are errors, but there's no mechanism to say 'that clearly must be a period.' The elder tool, the crypt breaker's workbench, has an interactive GUI, but it was written back in the 80's and it shows.

I first cleaned up the code enough that it would compile without errors. It's a termcap / curses application, using a bit of each, in ways that segfaults on my Mac. I attempted to hardcode around some of the nonsense, and ended up with something that runs, but displays incorrectly (and unusably). I'm probably going to have to burn a solid day to tear out all the old character graphics and port it to ncurses or even to a modern GUI app. But all so that I can read a small pile of 20 year old email. Worth it? Maybe.

Am I missing something? Is there some other modern port of the crypt breaker's workbench? Is there a binary that I can get which just runs?