🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.042050.1180@unlv.edu> flagg@blind-lemon.cs.unlv.edu (Scott Cunningham) writes:
>In article <66926@cup.portal.com> Christopher_C_Lapp@cup.portal.com  
>writes:
> "How about a cryptosystem that used the teachings of various
> "religious figures in the Bible as its key?
> "he/she would assign a "long beep" to sins in the bible, and a
> "short beep" to those that weren't. By using the bible as the key, we
> "could have uncrackable, undetectable, and public key encryption.
> "Any comments?
> "Chris Lapp
>
>Why not use another more obscure text and do the same thing.  For example  
>use a different pulp romance novel each time and associate your sins with  
>those which actually occured in the book used.  This is by no means  
>uncrackable, just real obscure.  It breaks down when you have to tell your  
>partner what book to use, if someone were to find out they would have your  
>code down cold in minutes.  The way around this is to use an encryption  
>like RSA where each person has his/her own key thus no key to have to  
>transmit, no key to intercept.

The problem with using some more obscure text is that the men wearing
dark suits are more likely to get suspicious if they notice that there's
several hundred people carrying around the same Harlequin romance.  With
the Bible, if the spy is a traveller, he wouldn't even have to carry one,
since most hotels have one in the bedside drawer (and for standardization
purposes, it might be wise to go with the "Gideon" standard of the NASB
Bible, which is the one in the hotels).

Another possibility would be for the spies to choose something based on
the #1 bestseller of the week (or maybe #2).  Nobody is surprised at the 
airport if they see someone carrying the latest Clancy book onto the 
plane...  it wouldn't be a bestseller if there weren't lots of people
that bought the book!  (Flames about the ways ``bestsellers'' are chosen
by the media will be cheerfully ignored ;-)

-- 
Christopher Browne
cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca
University of Ottawa
Master of System Science Program