> On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Harvey Newstrom wrote: This doesn't add
> > any cryptographic strength to the message, but is a form of "security
> > by obscurity".
>
> Here's 20 tons of paper. Find me the 18th century manuscript. You have 30
> seconds.
I once wrote a long silly novel. I still have it, in MS Word. I
could encode a message into that novel by inserting each word
of the message into the text at some random interval, then
patching the sentences around it so that the resulting text is
no more silly than the original. Then I could encode a number
at the end, which when multiplied by your private key, would
tell you to find the 156th word, the 284th, the 416th, etc. You
could get my message and no one could ever prove I had
encoded a message in it, nor could they endure reading my
entire silly novel to even try to find it. Security by excruciating
boredom.
Nowthen, we could use a wordspew algorithm to take my
novel and generate from it any arbitrary number of similarly
silly novels, into which messages could be encoded. This
would of course be enormously wasteful of bandwidth, as in
Gene's 20 tons of paper example, but email is free, so who
cares? The encryption guys will always be able to defeat
the crackers, regardless of clipper chip or otherwise. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:51 MDT