On 24/12/12 15:22 PM, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
Has anyone had the privilege of looking at the "stronger than military
grade" [encryption] scheme?
There is no such thing, really. "Military grade" is a term invented by
the civilian crypto marketeers to cash in on the secrecy of classified
schemes. The hope is that if a scheme is secret it must be stronger,
which is only sometimes true. We don't know so we are suitably awed.
NSA defines Suite A and Suite B which are for intel agencies and for
classified non-intel agencies, respectively. Most other countries have
their own lists.
In the real military (as opposed to intel), folk talk about tactical
codes and strategic codes. Tactical codes are ones where we know the
enemy will know the information in some short period like hours or days,
so they only have to last that long. The canonical example here is is a
field cipher used by a platoon to send in a 'contact report' or battle
report. The report states location, enemy wounded and killed, etc; the
enemy knows how many it lost and the location, so it gains a 'crib' or
some likely words to assist cracking a short term code.
Strategic codes are ones that are meant to last a lot longer. These are
typically used between HQs. I'd expect these distinctions to disappear
somewhat with net-centric warfare tho :)
iang
PS: if you aren't convinced that Tigerspike is total marketing nonsense,
try and debug that last para ;)
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