🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <n0e49t@ofa123.fidonet.org> Erik.Lindano@ofa123.fidonet.org writes:
>Writes lwloen@rchland.vnet.ibm.com (Larry Loen):
>> You could be asking for dozens to thousands of hours of 
>> work under the conditions you cite. 
> 
> Really??!! It might take that long for a professional cryptanalyst
> to decrypt ONE SINGLE SHORT ENGLISH WORD in the midst of hundreds
> of English words whose plain and encrypted forms are both released?
> 
> Do you mean that? If that's the case, what is the purpose of all
> the DES and RSA and PGP and all the other stuff? If it's so hard
> to decrypt ONE WORD encrypted by our "junky" and worthless method, 
> why do we need all those "non-junky" and "worthy" methods???? 

First off, the "dozens to thousands of hours" is the time to break
the whole _method_.  Once that is done the specific messages become
close to trivial.


>> Moreover, in any real-world situation of any importance whatever, 
>> the algorithm WILL be known. 
> 
> You are absolutely wrong.

Oh, c'mon now.  If the scheme is to be used by more than a
small handful of people then at least the executable will
be available for analysis.  And with a suitible effort at
disassembly/decompiling it can be analysed for the underlying
algolrithm.


Your proposed modification of the prize to include airfare in
addition to dinner is much better incentive -- before you
were suggesting that someone spend their time breaking your
system and spending hundreds of dollars of their own money
in order to claim a "free" dinner.  Didn't sound like much
of an inducement to me.

As to why I'm not picking this up:  I'm a crypto-protocol
kinda guy; I take secure encryption as an abstrict axiomatic
primitive and work from there; I'm not well versed in
traditional cryptanalysis.

		--Ken Pizzini