[306] in Cypherpunks
The Halting Problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (peb@PROCASE.COM)
Wed May 12 15:19:53 1993
Date: Wed, 12 May 93 12:00:00 PDT
From: peb@PROCASE.COM
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
It occurred to me that determining whether a set of random bytes is
actually a crypto message could be reduced to the halting problem.
Given this, it would be theoretically impossible to prove that an
uncrackable message was indeed a crypto message. The revelation here
(for me, anyway) is that if arbitrary crypto were made illegal, the
burden of proof would be on the prosecution which would have to crack
the message (at least partially).
Paul E. Baclace
peb@procase.com
