John Hebert wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: Alvaro Zuniga > To: [email protected] > Sent: 6/18/03 6:20 PM > Subject: Re: NSA's decryption clusters vs GPG, et.al. was RE: GPG does not > pro vide "end to end encryption", but only mail c onte nt encryption was RE: > [brlug-general] Cox and smtp pain today. > > Dear John: > > I suppose from this point of view there is not need to even bother with > encryption because brute force eventually prevails. > > John: Not at all. The dilemma that the NSA faces is that they want to > decrypt messages A,B,C,... but they will always have limited resources to > perform brute force decryption. So, they better be damned sure that message > A is the most important of all the messages they want to decrypt. > > However, a better cipher requires that many more computers exponentially; > therefore, we could at least make it more difficult for those who really > care about our business. > > John: Or just have more people using encryption. I've read estimates that > less than 1% of Internet traffic is encrypted. By merely advocating that > more people use encryption and raising that to 2%, we would require the NSA > and other intelligence operations to double their decryption resources. This > is the nightmare scenario that keeps the NSA IT Director up at night. > [omitted]
Or we could make it impossible by using one-time pad encryption: http://www.vidwest.com/otp/ If we could only think of a way to exchange the pads effectively. -- Craig Jackson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
