Re: [Cryptography] encoding formats should not be committee'ised
On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, Peter Gutmann wrote: For those not familiar with TL1, supposed to be readable here means encoded in ASCII rather than binary. It's about as readable as EDIFACT and HL7. In a previous life I had to read, understand, and debug EDIFACT (it was OpenLDAP, as I recall). It wasn't all that difficult; then again, at one time I had to know APL\360 (once described as a write-only language). Want crypto? Try obscurity :-) -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] encoding formats should not be committee'ised
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Jerry Leichter wrote: Always keep in mind - when you argue for easy readability - that one of COBOL's design goals was for programs to be readable and understandable by non-programmers. Managers, in particular. -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] RSA recommends against use of its own products.
On Thu, 26 Sep 2013, ianG wrote: Right, scratch the Brits and the French. Maybe AU, NZ? I don't know. Maybe the Germans / Dutch / Austrians. At the risk of getting political, I'd recommend against AU (I live there). Our new gummint has already shown that it will put its own interests ahead of those of the people (cancelling the proposed National Broadband Network springs to mind). Switzerland, perhaps? They have a history of secrecy... -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] Radioactive random numbers
On Fri, 13 Sep 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: Given that there is One True Source of randomness to wit radioactive What makes you think that e.g. breakdown oin a reverse biased Zener diode is any less true random? Or thermal noise in a crappy CMOS circuit? It was a throw-away line; sigh... The capitals should've been a hint. And yes, I know about crappy CMOS circuits; I've unintentionally built enough of them :-) In fact, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator#Physical_phenomena_with_quantum-random_properties listens a lot of potential sources, some with a higher rate and more private than others. Thanks. -- Dave, who must stop being subtle ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
[Cryptography] Radioactive random numbers
Another whacky idea... Given that there is One True Source of randomness to wit radioactive emission, has anyone considered playing with old smoke detectors? The ionising types are being phased out in favour of optical (at least in Australia) so there must be heaps of them lying around. I know - legislative requirements, HAZMAT etc, but it ought to make for a good thought experiment. -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
[Cryptography] XORing plaintext with ciphertext
Got a question that's been bothering me for a whlie, but it's likely purely academic. Take the plaintext and the ciphertext, and XOR them together. Does the result reveal anything about the key or the painttext? -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] XORing plaintext with ciphertext
Thanks for the response; that's what I thought, but thought I'd better ask (I'm still new at this crypto game). -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] Why human-readable IDs (was Re: Email and IM are ideal candidates for mix networks)
Please stop using that stupid Reply All function; I'm on the list, and will hence see your reply anyway. I don't need my own bloody personal copy of it. -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
Re: [Cryptography] Why human-readable IDs (was Re: Email and IM are ideal candidates for mix networks)
On Wed, 28 Aug 2013, Perry E. Metzger wrote: Anyway, I've already started implementing my proposed solution to that part of the problem. There is still a need for a distributed database to handle the lookup load, though, and one that is not the DNS. (Delurking) This suggests the use of LDAP. -- Dave ___ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
