If the following information does not satisfy your curiosity check out Peter Gutmann's SFS Pages.

What is SFS?

To quote from the manual:

Ever since Julius Caesar used the cipher which now bears his name to try to hide his military dispatches from prying eyes, people have been working on various means to keep their confidential information private. Over the years, the art of cryptography (that is, of scrambling information so only those in possession of the correct password can unscramble it) has progressed from simple pencil-and-paper systems to more sophisticated schemes involving complex electromechanical devices and eventually computers. The means of breaking these schemes has progressed on a similar level. Today, with the ever-increasing amount of information stored on computers, good cryptography is needed more than ever before.

There are two main areas in which privacy protection of data is required:

SFS is intended to solve the problem of protecting bulk data stored on disk. The protection of electronic messages is best solved by software packages such as PGP (available on sites the world over) or various versions of PEM (currently available mainly in the US, although non-US versions are beginning to appear).

You can get a detailed list of SFS-features , also taken from the manual.

If you're still not satisfied with this information, you can get the complete manual in LaTeX-format, or the SFS-package including device drivers, executables and documentation in plain ASCII format. These are also available from ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/crypt and various garbo mirror sites.

For the binaries in the package some PGP-signatures have been included. If you want to check these, here is a PGP-keyring, including Peter Gutmann's key.

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