Cryptography-Digest Digest #864, Volume #10 Fri, 7 Jan 00 17:13:01 EST
Contents:
Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon? (drickel)
Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?) (John Myre)
Re: frequency analysis with homophones (Mok-Kong Shen)
Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?) ("Tony T. Warnock")
Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon? ("Tony T. Warnock")
Re: Wagner et Al. (John Myre)
Re: Blowfish ("Rick Braddam")
Re: Large Numbers Beginner Question ("Alexander J. Fanti")
Re: Unsafe Advice in Cryptonomicon (Steve K)
Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon? (Xcott Craver)
Re: REDOC: First use: key dependent S-BOXES (SCOTT19U.ZIP_GUY)
Re: frequency analysis with homophones ("r.e.s.")
Re: OLD RLE TO NEW BIJECTIVE RLE (SCOTT19U.ZIP_GUY)
Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?) (Mike Rosing)
Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?) (Dan Day)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: drickel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon?
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 12:07:21 -0800
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(John Savard) wrote:
> It doesn't appear, though, even if one is allowed to use the word
> "Qwghlm", that it is possible to compose an English sentence using
> all
> 26 letters of the alphabet exactly once...
> John Savard (jsavard<at>ecn<dot>ab<dot>ca)
> http://www.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/crypto.htm
Squdgy fez, blank jimp vox crwth?
(not mine, i got it from some magazine in jr high school)
david rickel
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
------------------------------
From: John Myre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?)
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 13:04:21 -0700
William Rowden wrote:
> Dan Day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
> > I still recall the day when I first discovered that the written
> > "chaos" and the spoken "kay'os" were the same word...
> :-)
>
> I, too, was a reading child. "Omnipotent" is logically "omni-potent"
> /om'nee poe'tent/, right? I also remember the quizzical look I
> received when I first said "annihilation," complete with two short
> i's. Why is that "h" there?
:-)
It isn't quite the same, but I certainly remember my chagrin when I
figured out that "misled" is not the past tense of "misle" (with a
long "i" and "s" as "z").
(For those who don't know English so well - there is no such word as
"misle". If there were, why of course it would mean "to mislead").
John
P.S.
More on the vagaries of English, particularly spelling...
Do you remember the joke about how to pronounce "ghoti"?
"gh" as in "enough"
"o" as in "women"
"ti" as in "nation"
so...
pronounce it: "fish"!
------------------------------
From: Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: frequency analysis with homophones
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 21:23:39 +0100
r.e.s. wrote:
>
> "Mok-Kong Shen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote ...
> : r.e.s. wrote:
> : > I appreciate your following comments, but in the present case
> : > it's not a question of how best to design a substitution table.
> : > Rather, I'm trying to get a handle on why in certain cases the
> : > frequency subtotals (of a cipher of unknown design), divided
> : > by the total number of ciphertext letters, agree so well with
> : > the ranked p(i), these coresponding to the common frequencies
> : > found for English letters (I=26). The question is a statistical one
> : > as to whether the agreement is merely coincidental or is actually
> : > due to the substitution table being as simple as hypothesized.
> :
> : If I understand correctly, you assume that a set of ciphertext
> : characters are homophones of A, another set are homophones of B, etc.
> : and you sum the frequencies of these groups and obtain a distribution
> : that fairly agrees with a certain distribution you deem to be
> : representative of the plaintext and want to know whether that
> : assumption is correct.
>
> No. There is no assumption that particular symbols are the homophones
> of any particular plaintext letter -- some just happen to get grouped
> together when their frequencies are ranked. What is assumed is that
> there are J homophones -- whatever they are -- per plaintext letter.
The fundamental problem I can see is the non-reversibility of
implication. That is, if one uses J homophones for each plaintext
character, then one has the frequency distribution you obtained.
But the implication in the reverse direction is not logically sound.
(Equivalence has to be proved in logic.)
>
> : I don't think you can do that. For there
> : wouldn't be much practically detectable difference if, for example,
> : you exchange one of the assumed homophones of A with one of E. After
> : all, the particular piece of plaintext involved may have a frequency
> : distribution fairly deviated from the representative distribution
> : so that much reliance on any 'exact' computation is illusory.
>
> The original statistics question I asked seeks to make your statement
> precise. By obtaining the statistical properties of the frequency
> subtotals, which is what I was asking for, one has a quantitative basis
> for reasoning about how they might or might not have been generated.
> Other posters have pointed out other (presumably better) ways to go about
> that, but the statistical problem I posed is of interest in its own
> right, imho.
If you know the 'exact' frequency distribution, then you can deduce
'exact' results by always doing 'exact' numberical computations.
Otherwise, as said, the inevitable (unknown) deviation of the
frequency distribution of the particular piece of plaintext from the
'representative' frequency distribution does not allow you to deduce
any 'exact' results, if the only thing you have at hand is that
'representative' distribution. In terms of common numerical
computations, the error bounds of the results are simply too large.
>
> : Note that, while the normal use of homopnone substitutions attempts to
> : achieve a uniform distribution, one can also use homophones to
> : deceive the analyst. Just for illustration purpose, suppose you have a
> : plaintext alphabet consisting of the digits 0-9, and you have a uniform
> : distribution of these (for instance the digits are fairly random),
> : you could attempt to map that to A-Z (or a permutation of these) in
> : such a way that the distribution more or less parallels to one of
> : natural languages, thus disguising the digit origin of your plaintext.
> : From this viewpoint, one once again sees that your question above
> : cannot be answered in the affirmative with 'any' certainty.
>
> It's good that you put 'any' in quotes, because that's a main issue
> -- no one is asking for certainty. The question is one of statistics,
> implicitly recognizing the probabilistic nature of the problem. It
> doesn't ask for certainty, but for clues, in the sense of what is
> or is not to be expected in ciphertext under some specific conditions.
But if a piece of evidence could be (almost equally 'convincingly')
interpreted in a number of different (or even opposite) ways, then
one doesn't get any essential informations from it, I am afraid.
M. K. Shen
------------------------------
From: "Tony T. Warnock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?)
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 13:27:09 -0700
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
John Myre wrote:
> William Rowden wrote:
> > Dan Day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ...
> > > I still recall the day when I first discovered that the written
> > > "chaos" and the spoken "kay'os" were the same word...
> > :-)
> >
> > I, too, was a reading child. "Omnipotent" is logically "omni-potent"
> > /om'nee poe'tent/, right? I also remember the quizzical look I
> > received when I first said "annihilation," complete with two short
> > i's. Why is that "h" there?
>
> :-)
>
> It isn't quite the same, but I certainly remember my chagrin when I
> figured out that "misled" is not the past tense of "misle" (with a
> long "i" and "s" as "z").
>
> (For those who don't know English so well - there is no such word as
> "misle". If there were, why of course it would mean "to mislead").
>
> John
>
> P.S.
> More on the vagaries of English, particularly spelling...
>
> Do you remember the joke about how to pronounce "ghoti"?
>
> "gh" as in "enough"
> "o" as in "women"
> "ti" as in "nation"
>
> so...
> pronounce it: "fish"!
There is no English word with gh at the beginning of a sylable that has the
f sound. There is only one word with o as a short i. There are no words in
English with ti as sh (there are words with tion as shun or tian ash shun.)
Shaw's example is cute but has little to do with English spelling. On the
other hand, "unionize" is fun to give to automatic hyphenation routines.
------------------------------
From: "Tony T. Warnock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon?
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 13:28:58 -0700
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Zing, vext cwm fly jabs kurd qoph.
------------------------------
From: John Myre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Wagner et Al.
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 13:26:42 -0700
Guy Macon wrote:
<snip>
> BTW, the swap problem is trivial to solve. Use NT Embedded and
> don't have a swap file, and put your OS and applications on a
> ROM chip. I can't do this because I need a real file server,
> but this would be a god way to build a dedicated crypto box.
^^^
No, no, no.
The god way is to do it all in your head...
JM
------------------------------
From: "Rick Braddam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Blowfish
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 13:56:40 -0600
karl malbrain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:KNqd4.3$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
|>
|> r.e.s. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
|> news:853unb$r21$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
|> > Since you might browse into this out of curiosity as I did,
|> >
|> > My AV software (McAfee) reports that the file
|> > boblowfish1-1.zip
|> > at
|> > ftp://ftp.replay.com/pub/replay/pub/crypto/LIBS/blowfish/
|> > contains a virus called "Orifice2K.plugin".
|> > (Today, 1/6/00, I notified the webmaster at the ftp site.)
|>
|> This does NOT mean there actually is a virus. I have the same
problem with
|> McAfee claiming my install program is a virus. The problem comes
from the
|> SIGNATURE method for virus detection. Karl M
The txt file which comes in boblowfish1-1.zip specifically states that
the blowfish provided therein is a plugin for Back Orifice. It allows
the encryption of information transferred between the BO client and
server.
--
Rick
============================
Spam bait (With credit to E. Needham):
root@localhost
postmaster@localhost
admin@localhost
abuse@localhost
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: "Alexander J. Fanti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Large Numbers Beginner Question
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 20:48:20 GMT
Thanks everybody. I'll start looking for these libraries right away.
"Alexander J. Fanti" wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm a newbie... so I'll be brief, any help would be appreciated...
>
> I'm interested in public key cryptography. I've read that I'll need to
> deal with large numbers (ie 256 bit numbers (2^256)). My compiler only
> supports integers up to 64 bits (and they're signed!).
>
> What do I do?
> Is there some computer math book I need to read to learn how to generate
> 512 bit random numbers and primes? Do people writing these routines for
> Intel processors use specail compilers?
>
> Thanks,
> Alex
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Steve K)
Subject: Re: Unsafe Advice in Cryptonomicon
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 20:53:43 GMT
>Great plot-save.
Thankew thankew (bow).
>However the kind of magnetic field used to purge magnetic data
>remanence is an alternating magnetic field - as in Type II
>degaussers.
>
>Perhaps your plot-save could involve (extremely) rapid "Clank"-ing
>back-and-forth to alternate sides of the door-frame? ;-)
Only if they were carrying magnets through the door, and keeping them
lined up exactly with the field. AC magnets pull non-polarized
materials toward the nearest reigon of high(er) field concentration
OK. Granted, though, there would be a lot of BZZZZ in that "clank"
'cause of the hysteresis of the materials....
;o))
Steve K
---Continuing freedom of speech brought to you by---
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.epic.org/
http://www.cdt.org/
PGP key 0x5D016218
All others have been revoked.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Xcott Craver)
Subject: Re: Why the Cryptonomicon in Cryptonomicon?
Date: 7 Jan 2000 20:48:19 GMT
John Savard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>It doesn't appear, though, even if one is allowed to use the word
>"Qwghlm", that it is possible to compose an English sentence using all
>26 letters of the alphabet exactly once...
Our own Claude Shannon, among other things, is known for
having composed just such a sentence: "Squdgy fez, blank
jimp crwth vox!"
>John Savard (jsavard<at>ecn<dot>ab<dot>ca)
-Scott
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (SCOTT19U.ZIP_GUY)
Subject: Re: REDOC: First use: key dependent S-BOXES
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 22:29:24 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mok-Kong Shen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>karl malbrain wrote:
>>
>> It seems to me that BLOWFISH, and other key-dependent S-BOX authors, should
>> be giving credit to Michael Wood for using his invention. Karl M
>
>I have a little problem with terminology. If one uses a key to
>construct a monoalphabetic substitution in the classical way,
>doesn't that also qualify as a 'key dependent S-Box'? Thanks.
>
>M. K. Shen
Actually any classic block cipher can be thought of as a "key dependent
S-box". Its just that in most cases the S-box is to large to be put in all of
memory at one time. And most use such wimpy small keys that it is not
worth treating it as an S-box.
David A. Scott
--
SCOTT19U.ZIP NOW AVAILABLE WORLD WIDE
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/Kong/scott19u.zip
Scott famous encryption website NOT FOR WIMPS
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/index.htm
Scott rejected paper for the ACM
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/dspaper.htm
Scott famous Compression Page WIMPS allowed
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/compress.htm
**NOTE EMAIL address is for SPAMERS***
I leave you with this final thought from President Bill Clinton:
"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the
truth."
------------------------------
From: "r.e.s." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: frequency analysis with homophones
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 13:40:35 -0800
"Mok-Kong Shen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote ...
: r.e.s. wrote:
[...]
: > No. There is no assumption that particular symbols are the homophones
: > of any particular plaintext letter -- some just happen to get grouped
: > together when their frequencies are ranked. What is assumed is that
: > there are J homophones -- whatever they are -- per plaintext letter.
:
: The fundamental problem I can see is the non-reversibility of
: implication. That is, if one uses J homophones for each plaintext
: character, then one has the frequency distribution you obtained.
: But the implication in the reverse direction is not logically sound.
: (Equivalence has to be proved in logic.)
The fundamental problem, I'm afraid, is that you're looking at what
the data does or does not "logically imply", while the issue is one
of plausible inference in the presence of uncertainty -- not one of
strict logical implication. That is why the problem is posed as a
statistical one in the first place.
: > The original statistics question I asked seeks to make your statement
: > precise. By obtaining the statistical properties of the frequency
: > subtotals, which is what I was asking for, one has a quantitative basis
: > for reasoning about how they might or might not have been generated.
: > Other posters have pointed out other (presumably better) ways to go
about
: > that, but the statistical problem I posed is of interest in its own
: > right, imho.
:
: If you know the 'exact' frequency distribution, then you can deduce
: 'exact' results by always doing 'exact' numberical computations.
: Otherwise, as said, the inevitable (unknown) deviation of the
: frequency distribution of the particular piece of plaintext from the
: 'representative' frequency distribution does not allow you to deduce
: any 'exact' results, if the only thing you have at hand is that
: 'representative' distribution.
Nobody knows the exact distribution, nor does the statistical
approach attempt to "deduce" exact results. The problem is one of
plausible *induction*, not deduction.
: In terms of common numerical
: computations, the error bounds of the results are simply too large.
It's probably what you're calling "error bounds" that I was
asking for in the original posting. It would be interesting to
actually know what they are, rather than speculate about them.
: > no one is asking for certainty. The question is one of statistics,
: > implicitly recognizing the probabilistic nature of the problem. It
: > doesn't ask for certainty, but for clues, in the sense of what is
: > or is not to be expected in ciphertext under some specific conditions.
:
: But if a piece of evidence could be (almost equally 'convincingly')
: interpreted in a number of different (or even opposite) ways, then
: one doesn't get any essential informations from it, I am afraid.
As I said before, the statistical properties I asked for will make
your statements more precise -- and also less speculative.
--
r.e.s.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (SCOTT19U.ZIP_GUY)
Subject: Re: OLD RLE TO NEW BIJECTIVE RLE
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 22:25:17 GMT
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(John Savard) wrote:
>On Fri, 07 Jan 2000 05:24:42 GMT, Tom St Denis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>wrote:
>
>>You are really reaching now. The huffman was bad enough but RLE?
>
>>It's not even worth thinking about. Why not work out a more efficent
>>enigma or something?
>
>I could think of many reasons to criticize his posts, or to dismiss
>the importance of his work, but this is not one I would have thought
>of.
>
>Anyhow, whatever techniques he is using with RLE are likely to be more
>similar than those needed for Huffman - which does have its place - to
>those needed to achieve David A. Scott's goal of one-to-one
>compression with a compressor of the type you seem to approve of, the
>Lempel-Ziv family. Perhaps that's what we're going to hear about next.
>
>(For myself, while I too think removing certain reduncancies from
>compression have their uses, I quarrel with any attempt to emphasize
>one-to-one purity at the expense of bias. That was the flaw in his
>Huffman proposal.)
What you still lack the knowledge to understand it that there was
no bias. I have should how you can change the last byte to any of
the 256 bit combinations and still get a unique decompression but
your to stupid to understand it. Also the method Matt used was different
than my method. The type of files that I plan to use in the future are of
the type where last bit that is a "one" marks the end of the file this is the
opposite direction of the BS crypto crowd. Where the blocks are becoming
larger and larger multiples of whole bytes. Scott16f will work on files such
that only the bits upto and not inculding the last "one" So when you see
an ecrypted file of the form ... 10100 You can be assured that the file
before encryption but after compression ended with 100 If this is a bias
to you tough shit. But why limit encryption to bytes when you can just encrypt
the shortest FOF file from what every your compression is.
Also there are at least 4 seperate ways to end the file. My orginal way
then the way in my focused method then Matts way of 1000 or 0000 and
by last way if converting a huffman stream to a FOF file which is different
yet and is what is in my latest conditional huffman compression to a FOF
file. But I'm sure your either to lazy and/or to stupid to understand it Mr
JS.
David A. Scott
--
SCOTT19U.ZIP NOW AVAILABLE WORLD WIDE
http://www.jim.com/jamesd/Kong/scott19u.zip
Scott famous encryption website NOT FOR WIMPS
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/index.htm
Scott rejected paper for the ACM
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/dspaper.htm
Scott famous Compression Page WIMPS allowed
http://members.xoom.com/ecil/compress.htm
**NOTE EMAIL address is for SPAMERS***
I leave you with this final thought from President Bill Clinton:
"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the
truth."
------------------------------
From: Mike Rosing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?)
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 15:54:56 -0600
John Myre wrote:
>
> William Rowden wrote:
> > Dan Day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ...
> > > I still recall the day when I first discovered that the written
> > > "chaos" and the spoken "kay'os" were the same word...
> > :-)
> >
> > I, too, was a reading child. "Omnipotent" is logically "omni-potent"
> > /om'nee poe'tent/, right? I also remember the quizzical look I
> > received when I first said "annihilation," complete with two short
> > i's. Why is that "h" there?
>
> :-)
>
> It isn't quite the same, but I certainly remember my chagrin when I
> figured out that "misled" is not the past tense of "misle" (with a
> long "i" and "s" as "z").
>
> (For those who don't know English so well - there is no such word as
> "misle". If there were, why of course it would mean "to mislead").
My wife still laughs when I say armegadon - ar-MEG-a-don. I think
it was some 20 years before I actually heard anyone else say the
word right :-)
Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dan Day)
Subject: Re: Mispronounce words. (OT Re: How to pronounce "Vigenere"?)
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 22:02:15 GMT
On Fri, 07 Jan 2000 13:27:09 -0700, "Tony T. Warnock"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> "gh" as in "enough"
>> "o" as in "women"
>> "ti" as in "nation"
>>
>> so...
>> pronounce it: "fish"!
>
>There is no English word with gh at the beginning of a sylable that has the
>f sound. There is only one word with o as a short i. There are no words in
>English with ti as sh (there are words with tion as shun or tian ash shun.)
>Shaw's example is cute but has little to do with English spelling.
I think you're being overly pedantic here.
Yes, if someone is intimately familiar with English spelling and
pronunciation, they'll know that "gh" can only be an "f" at the END
of a syllable, etc., but the entire POINT is that those coming to
English for the first time find so many exceptions, special rules,
special cases, and obscure points that they find it very hard to
get a grasp on them all.
The point of the "ghoti" example is that you can find "special cases"
so "special" that even native English speakers may not recognize
them when they come up in a different context.
It would be nearly impossible to come up with an equivalent
example in, say, Spanish.
And speaking of Spanish...
> On the
>other hand, "unionize" is fun to give to automatic hyphenation routines.
I once heard a bunch of young ladies from South America, who were
at a US college in order to learn English, try to pronounce the
name of the town of "Uniondale". It came out "Oon-ee-un-DAH-lay".
Three syllables rendered as five, a different syllable stressed,
and absolutely no syllable in common with the English pronunciation.
--
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the
plain Meaning of Words!"
--Samuel Adams (1722-1803), letter to John Pitts, January 21, 1776
------------------------------
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