On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Jon Callas <j...@callas.org> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > I am reminded of an article my dear old friend, Martin Minow, did in > Cryptologia ages ago. He wrote the article I think for the April 1984 issue. > It might not have been 1984, but it was definitely April. > > In it, he described a cryptosystem in which you set the key to be the same as > the plaintext and then XOR them together. There is a two-fold beauty to this. > > First that you have full information-theoretic security on the scheme. It is > every bit as secure as a one-time pad without the restrictions of a one-time > pad as to randomness of the keys and so on. > > The second wonderful property is that the ciphertext is compressible. Usually > cipher text is not compressible, but in this case it is. Moreover, it is > *maximally* compressible. The ciphertext can be compressed to a single bit > and the ciphertext length recovered after key distribution.
Surely it can be compress to no bits at all? _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
