On Tue, 4 Jun 2002, Micah Cowan wrote: > <rant> > Which is why you should get extremely skeptical when a company called > Prescient claims to have created a "virtually unbreakable" encryption > system called e2sec, which claims to be a Vernam Cipher, yet its proud > creators say that rather than having to store and pass around large > keys, they pass around mathematical functions from which the keys are > generated. Which means that the keys are *not* random - and therefore, > by definition, *not* a Vernam Cipher. And therefore, not proven to be > virtually unbreakable, as they claim.
It's amazing the self-deception these kind of companies are capable of. I remember Prof. Bishop telling me about another company he'd heard of, claiming--you guessed it--mathematically unbreakable secure communications using OTP. You crypto-knowledgeable people know that the trouble with OTP (with any symmetric cipher, actually) is key exchange--you have to get the key to the guy at the other end. So Bishop asked how the pads were tranferred. Why, they were sent across the same wire, encrypted; effectively, the security of the message now rested in the encryption of the key, only they STILL thought it was "mathematically unbreakable". D'oh! :) One of these days we should have a crypto talk or something; nothing fancy, maybe just outlining what it can and can't do, and how to recognize snake oil pitches. --nicole twn *** "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of."--They Might Be Giants Visit Nicolopolis! http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~carlsonn [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech