well awesome, welcome to the forum and thanks for letting everyone know they are wasting their time on this because you are nearly finished. that's a two person nightshift and 20+ hours of coding beeing utterly useless now.
Sorry, I started this yesterday when being stuck at an airport - fully aware that I was probably too late anyway. So any status update would've been "I am looking into this" - which I am sure would not have deterred you or anyone else from continuing (I see a couple of those status updates earlier in this thread...).
Batmaninpink, your code was superior upon inspection due to proper use of the fc library for managing encryption. The other submission had potential memory leaks and used OpenSSL calls directly without clear tracking of memory or exception safety. Your submission also had better abstraction of data parsing.
I have merged your code and will be evaluating it prior to paying the bounty.
Drekrob, your submission was also very good and absent the competition may have been accepted after some robustness enhancements. I will give you a 30 PTS tip for your submission (~$360 dollars) which should partially recognize your time. These bounties are a kind of interview and so redundant work actually has value to us.
It is very clear to me that you are both talented developers and I would like to discuss how we can work together on a non-bounty basis to eliminate redundant effort. I am looking for some serious c++ full time developers.
Please provide me your PTS addresses.