Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Shea Tisdale" <shea AT sheatisdale.com>]

You beat me to it Steve.  Everyone things because computers are so good that
you can just encrypt something using elfin magic or something and it's
unbreakable.

Although in fairness there are still some unbroken codes...they just aren't
a priority to break.  The statue Cryptos at the CIA building for instance
has a coded message on it that has never been broken.  But if may fall under
the one-time pad category.  No one knows and the creator won't say.

The real question in cryptography is security.  A code is good if it cannot
be broken in the amount of time required for the information to no longer be
valuable.  If we were going to the Burger King today at 4pm and didn't want
anyone to know, the code only need to be good until 6pm or so.  That is
plenty of time to go there and leave.   Of course we couldn't use that code
again.  But it would be good enough for the job.  



> -----Original Message-----
> From: internetworkers-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:internetworkers-
> bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Steven Champeon
> Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 2:16 PM
> To: InterNetWorkers
> Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Iranian Security
> 
> on Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 01:51:38PM -0400, David Minton wrote:
> > This has always sounded fishy to me. If the Iranians knew their codes
> had
> > been compromised, why would they send such as message through these
> codes,
> > alerting the NSA? They could instead have fed the NSA false information.
> > Maybe the Chalabi message was such misinformation, if it ever existed.
> 
> To say nothing of this idiocy:
> 
> > > Recent reports that the United States had broken codes used by the
> Iranian
> > > intelligence service have intrigued experts on cryptology because a
> modern
> > > cipher should be unbreakable.
> 
> The only unbreakable cipher is a one-time pad. The journalist has been
> reading too much Dan Brown.
> 
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