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| Donald | Oct 17 2005, 01:23 PM |
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Elite member
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 But cows has hit upon an important truth. With modern cryptography, it is almost ALWAYS easier to find a weakness in the system then to break the the cipher. And the weakest point of the system is usually the people using it.This was true during WWII as well. The biggest holes in Enigma and Purple were actually lazy soldiers who set keys to their girlfriends names, idiot generals who sent the same messages twice (and often in two different ciphers), and empty headed cipher clerks who transmitted the keys to the new ciphers in the old one. If the NSA wants to read the encrypted messages coming out of the Iran embassy. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to offer a secretary $100,000 and U.S. Citizenship to hand over the keys than it is to break AES. And it's more likely that the people in the Embassy will do stupid things (like use the same one time pad twice), then that the NSA will find the key through cryptanalysis alone. And actually, that's probably the primary job of NSA cryptanalaysts today. Not to BREAK properly used strong cryptography, but to recognize when human beings have missused it and left the back door open. But hopefully they can find some way more subtle than shooting the courier. That only lets you read ONE message before they change the codes.  Donald |
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| Good Books · Off-topic | |
4:08 AM Nov 27
