On 28 Dec 2005 09:31:13 -0800,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hal Merritt) wrote:
>I seem to recall thought processes of just how hard it would be to
>actually recover information from such a tape without intimate knowledge
>of exactly how the tape was created and the record layout(s) of the
>tape.
...snip...
I can't speak to the ABN tape specifically, but I wonder about the case
where a tape is being used to transmit data between organizations; say
transaction data being sent from a merchant to a bank. Such data might not
be in a proprietary format, but in some industry-standard format for which
format specifications, record layouts and so forth might be readily
available.
Also, ISTM that the increased use of XML presents its own set of problems.
Unencrypted XML data might be quite easy to interpret "without intimate
knowledge of exactly how the tape was created and the record layout(s) of
the tape". And might encrypted XML files be somewhat vulnerable to
brute-force decryption attacks? IANACoC[1], but XML files are, after all,
text files that may contain known characters and strings. Heck, a
brute-force approach that happens to discover patterns of a left angle
bracket ("<") followed at some point by a right angle bracket (">") has
probably discovered a good clue towards decrypting the file.
Eric
[1] "I Am Not A Cryptographer or Cryptanalyst".
--
Eric Chevalier E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: www.tulsagrammer.com
Is that call really worth your child's life? HANG UP AND DRIVE!
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