On behalf of the group: Why the heck do you keep using this weird my-responses-are-marked-with-John quoting style? Are you having a problem with Outlook?
At 06:40 PM 6/18/2003 -0500, you 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. > >This reminds me of that John Travolta movie swordfish where the computer >person gradually quintuple the encryption of an algorithm to hide a bank >account. He also kept switching the values every few seconds ensuring >that it would be impossible to decrypt using brute force. > >John: As long as those values are random enough. If any pattern to those >values could be predicted and duplicated, brute force would still work. > >John Hebert >_______________________________________________ >General mailing list >[email protected] >http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > >_______________________________________________ >General mailing list >[email protected] >http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net --- Dustin Puryear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Puryear Information Technology Windows, UNIX, and IT Consulting http://www.puryear-it.com
