Thanks everyone for their great replies!

I agree this is largely a social problem that I am trying to work around, but it will unfortunately not be possible for me to change my local machine rights.

I also agree that VPN && SSL are far superior methods of securing the message stream, but the requirement is to evaluate a product's support for in-message DES ECB mode encryption, only.

I checked earlier & can confirm that in my copy of the Active State perl distribution, the DES binary is not included. They only distribute SSL by default

I've tried repeatedly installing using the perl shell route, but we have a proxy here that, even with appropriate authentication, still denies downloads.

I also hear what you say about installing properly vs just copying the pm files, but I've really no other choice, and frankly copying the pm files into my C: has worked very well for me until now - I've copied perhaps 20-50 pms this way very successfully.

I'd like to see if I can use the Crypt::DES_PP module. My understanding is that this module is implemented entirely in Perl, and does not require linking to a binary blob, or a C code interface. How would I go about using this module in the current context?