Introduction

Note: TEA Total hasn't been under active development for over two decades but I have decided to leave it up in case it is of historical interest to anyone.

TEA Total is a very small 128 bit private key based encryption/decryption system which uses the block variant of TEA (Tiny Encryption Algorithm) by David Wheeler and Roger Needham of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. TEA Total was written by Alex Holden. You can contact me at alex [at] alexholden [dot] net

TEA is said to be several times faster than DES, as well as being much smaller and possibly more secure. It also isn't encumbered by any patents and the reference implementation is in the public domain.

News

2/1/2001: Version 0.4 released. TEA Total now has password protected key and Base64 coding (ASCII Armour) support. Additionally a much more powerful command line argument parser was written, a lot of the code was restructured for easier maintenance, and it is now also available as source and x86 binary RPM packages.
27/12/2000: Version 0.3 released. TEA Total now has Huffman coding (compression) support, a full set of manual pages, and an internal secure random number generator for operating systems which don't provide one for us. Also, the key generator is now an applet instead of a seperate program, key generation works on OpenBSD as well as Linux, and it is possible to choose exactly which applets and extra features to build.
22/12/2000: Version 0.2 released. TEA Total now uses the block mode algorithm, which gives a greater than four fold speed increase, as well as greater efficiency and probably greater security (due to the use of a sequence number). TEA Total also now fully supports inter-operation between systems with both big and little endian byte orders. The file format should now be stable, and the program has been restructured internally to ease the addition of the network forwarding applets which I'm working on.

About TEA Total

Currently TEA Total only supports encryption and decryption of files (with optional compression and/or Base64 ASCII encoding). I am writing a set of TEA based encrypted tunnel programs which will allow you to wrap applications such that their input and output will be transparently forwarded over a network in encrypted form.

About the name: TEA Total is a play on the TEA encryption algorithm which is at the heart of the package, and the phrase "tee total"; a term used to refer to a person who does not drink alcohol. This is appropriate because I am tee total myself.

License

In the spirit of the TEA implementation itself, I have placed TEA Total in the public domain. You can do whatever you like with it, though I would prefer you to contribute any bug fixes back to me if possible.

Downloading

The latest available version of TEA Total is version 0.4. This is available:

Via HTTP from http://www.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/tea-total-0.4.tar.gz
Via FTP from ftp://ftp.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/tea-total-0.4.tar.gz
As a source RPM http://www.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/RPMS/tea-total-0.4-1.src.rpm
As an x86 binary RPM http://www.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/RPMS/tea-total-0.4-1.i386.rpm

Older versions are available from:
http://www.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/ and
ftp://ftp.linuxhacker.org/pub/tea-total/

Mailing List

There was a mailing list for discussion of TEA Total (now closed).
There is a web archive of the list available at this page.