Attempts to keep things secure by obfuscation will always be common. The tacit assumption that 'we', the defenders, are smarter than 'they', the attackers, has great appeal to the ignorant (and its greatest appeal to those who are manifestly dumber).
What is needed, however, is an open, published algorithm, breakable in an obvious way by enumeration but such that this enumeration requires a time long in comparison to human lifetimes when implemented on a computer that operates at the frequency of hard cosmic rays. Attempts to break a scheme that is without interest as a puzzle on behalf of one's great-great grandchildren will be rare, and they are anyway innocuous. The NSA and its sister five-eyes agencies of course know this, and they therefore oppose 1) standards that specify strong encryption and 2) its use in general. Any scheme they endorse is one for which they already have a trapdoor in place. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
