"And of course you can package 'strong' encryption into a 'weak' encryption envelope, so you will only know that 'strong' encryption has been used after you've broken the 'weak' envelope."
Oh yeah. Interesting. Of course, this would be done only if the sender knew or supected how mass-scanning might be done. And so the existence of another level of heavier encryption (see next paragraph) might be a tip off that this is not simply a financial transaction. But, it occurs to me that in some cases what might be done to determine the presence of hard encryption is for hardward to attempt to decrypt it for a certain fixed time, and if there's no success with X minutes/hours/milliseconds or whatever, then one assigns a certain probability that said message has been encrypted using something stronger than the International version of Bogus Notes (for instance). But of course, I'm willing to concede that at his point I'm talking completely out of my arse. (That will change when I get time to do some real homework in this area, however.) >From: Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: Tyler Durden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >CC: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Re: Echelon-like resources... >Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 13:32:45 +0200 (CEST) > >On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Tyler Durden wrote: > > > And indeed, in a world where most messages are fairly weakly encrypted, > > bursts of strongly-encrypted messages will stand out all the more and > > possibly flag the need for other methods of investigation. > >Doesn't figure: while it's easy to screen for high information entropy >(archives have a signature), telling weak encryption from strong is >nontrivial, unless it's conveniently labeled, and you're limiting the >attack to a tiny fraction of the entire traffic, not realtime. > >And of course you can package 'strong' encryption into a 'weak' encryption >envelope, so you will only know that 'strong' encryption has been used >after you've broken the 'weak' envelope. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
