🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <101547@netnews.upenn.edu> yee@mipg.upenn.edu (Conway Yee) writes:
>>Would it be possible to to devise a public key
>>encryption program that would, when used to encrypt a message with
>>someone's private key, emit a series of bytes that would appear to be
>>essentially random?  
>
>If a series of bytes were to be random, no message could possibly be
>encoded within it.

Sorry, but this is nonsense.  (also sorry if my reply is redundant with
others - -  my news feed is a bit delayed lately)


If a modern ciphertext is detectably non-random, then the encryption
algorithm is *broken*.

I haven't proved that if you detect a statistical non-randomness then you
have a means of breaking the cipher, but I wouldn't be surprised if such a
proof were done.  I have seen similar proofs.

Meanwhile, if you have a totally random stream of bytes, you can use it
as a one-time pad, encrypting a message within it, and the resulting
ciphertext is a totally random stream of bytes.  This one I can prove
-- and so can you -- assuming you discard the original random stream.

-- 
-- <<Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are my own, of course.>>
-- Carl Ellison						cme@sw.stratus.com
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