Is it useless? ISTR using bdes in the not-too-distant past...

Ah, I remembered the context! bdes was involved in decrypting the video of one of Kirk's lecture series.

While certainly bdes has no place in being used for a new crypto anything,
I think it is a useful tool to have around, for being able to read old files
that have been encrypted that way.

I might even be in favor of this if there was an equivalent port available,
but a quick check of /usr/ports/security doesn't trivially show anything
with equivalent functionality.

one can use openssl for that :)

In D9424#194723, @bapt wrote:

one can use openssl for that :)

It turns out, bdes does its own special thing to deal with a partial block at the end of the ciphered message. So when you decrypt it with openssl, you get an error, and the last 1-7 bytes of the message are cut off. (DES uses an 8 byte block size).

Kirk's website already offers a tarball of bdes you can download to decrypt his videos. If someone wants to create that as a port, that is fine with me, but i don't think we should keep it in the base system.