Cryptography

Lyle Burkhead (LYBRHED@delphi.com)
Sat, 28 Dec 1996 11:58:58 -0500 (EST)


I wrote

>: I could be wrong, but my mathematical common sense tells me
>: that each algorithm leaves some kind of fingerprint, and
>: distinguishing between them is just a matter of cleverness
>: and patience.

To which John Clark replied,

> In theory you could, in practice you could not, at least not unless
> you had a HUGE amount of cleverness or a COSMIC amount of
> patience. To break a good random number generator like Blum
> Blum Shub, the one that PGP uses...

I'm not saying I could "break" it. I'm just saying that, given two
bit streams, A and B, I could tell whether they were generated by the
same encryption algorithm, or different algorithms.

Lyle