[42289] in Cypherpunks
Re: Reformated: How secure....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Wed Oct 25 14:42:59 1995
To: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
Cc: privsoft@ix.netcom.com (Steve ), cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Oct 1995 12:59:04 CDT."
<199510251759.NAA26251@universe.digex.net>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 14:14:13 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Scott Brickner writes:
> "Perry E. Metzger" writes:
> >Amateurs pretending that they are professionals going out and selling
> >snake-oil crypto are one of the biggest threats in our business.
>
> and then...
>
> >I suspect it would take a real cryptographer very little effort to
> >break your system, but that no one will bother doing so because it
> >isn't really worth anyone's time.
>
> Well, Perry, if it's really such a threat, isn't it worth someone's
> time to combat it?
>
> Wasn't that point driven home by the Netscape PRNG problems?
Netscape is in wide use. If a substantial number of people bothered to
use the Privsoft, then it might be worth breaking it. As it stands, I
don't think its worth my while. Maybe someone out there wants to
bother to do it as an exercise. It unfortunately has a bit of added
complexity because you have to learn a bit about image statistics in
order to do a good job of segregating the images, but it also looks
like you might be able to use multiple anagramming to get a nice
handle on the thing so your statistics don't have to be particularly
good.
Perry
