[451] in Cypherpunks
Huffman and Crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (FutureNerd Steve Witham)
Thu May 20 16:09:17 1993
Date: Thu, 20 May 93 15:55:42 EDT
From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Sorry if these questions have been answered in posts I recently
deleted, but...
1) Instead of modifying Huffman coding, isn't it more sensible to
just use arithmetic coding, which is more efficient anyway, and
doesn't use fixed bit patterns?
2) I would assume there's a branch of cryptography devoted to studying
the protections or lack thereof, afforded by compression schemes, both
by themselves and in addition to other types of cryptography. I would
guess that Huffman and LZ-family codes have been studied a lot...right??
But also more general studies of the weakness of (even secret)
compression algorithms as crypto methods? I mean, compression methods
would tend to use methods (like table lookup) that simpler cyphers
have used for a long time, only without having been designed with
crypto expertise...right??
3) Does anyone know of an easy-to-get-sources, easy-to-use arithmetic
coding compression program?
quote me
-fnerd
