Re: successfully echelonised

From Michael James Pruitt <mpruitt@cs.uah.edu>
Date Mon, 27 Sep 1999 18:41:33 -0500
In-reply-to Your message of "Mon, 27 Sep 1999 18:45:36 EDT." <3.0.6.32.19990927184536.00899b60@post.acadia.net>


[: hacktivism :]

> So you think the NSA can crack Pretty Good Privacy?

Definitely. The question shouldn't be "can they" but rather
"how long will it take them". Considering that they are the
world's largest employer of cryptoanalysts and mathemeticians,
it wouldn't suprise me if they had devised some differential
cryptanalysis technique to speed up the cracking process.
To increase this time, you can:
	1. Increase the length of your key
	2. Decrease the amount of "guessable" plaintext (if one
knows with certainty that a given cyphertext contains a certain
plaintext string, it becomes simpler to crack the cyphertext)
	3. Decrease resources available to the NSA.

The first one is rather simple. Just use a 4K key. The second
one is also simple. Don't include a standard sig in your plaintext.
The last one can be accomplished by dramatically increasing the 
amount of encrypted traffic, thus making the NSA divide a relatively 
static pool of computing resources between an increasing pool of 
encrypted messages.

micahel

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