'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled

[Necuno]

sexy blond + 'encrypter geek' == key

 

[w1z4rd]

Im confident the guavament would not be able to get my data. They would have to:

a) Identify I have encrypted data
b) Identify which files the encrypted data is (you can stick encrypted files to normal files.. say like a media file)
c) Break the encryption. Something thats not going to happen without a lot more resources than the SA guava has.

Also, asking me for the password should I get arrested would get "Oh gee.. that ol thing? Cant remember... was so long ago".

 

[PeterCH]

Im confident the guavament would not be able to get my data. They would have to:

a) Identify I have encrypted data
b) Identify which files the encrypted data is (you can stick encrypted files to normal files.. say like a media file)
c) Break the encryption. Something thats not going to happen without a lot more resources than the SA guava has.

Also, asking me for the password should I get arrested would get "Oh gee.. that ol thing? Cant remember... was so long ago".

The SA govt would then put you in prison for the rest of your life if
they considered your data important enough. That you can't remember,
would be irrelevant as poor memory is no excuse to break the law, anywhere
on earth.

 

[w1z4rd]

The SA govt would then put you in prison for the rest of your life if
they considered your data important enough. That you can't remember,
would be irrelevant as poor memory is no excuse to break the law, anywhere
on earth.

How am I breaking the law?

 

[iDenTiTy]

sexy blond + 'encrypter geek' == key

All that's needed.

 

[dje]

If you test the lock against a code that is stored somewhere else on the internet, then it means that at some stage the unlock key, or even the unprotected data itself has to travel across the internet.

What you describe is called the Key Exchange Problem. It was solved in the 1970s with the invention of Public-Key Crypto (e.g., RSA).

By the way: to those who say that no cryptosystem is uncrackable, there are two responses:

1. If you consider humans (who can be tortured or bribed or whatever) to be part of a cryptosystem, then, yes, any cryptosystem can be `cracked', in the sense that the plaintext can be recovered.
2. If, however, we leave humans out of the definition of cryptosystem, then this statement is not true. Specifically, if one uses a One Time Pad in which each key is chosen randomly and independently of each other key, then it can be proved mathematically that an attacker intercepting a ciphertext gains no information at all about the content of the plaintext. The proof is not complicated (it's just conditional probability); the idea was introduced by Shannon in his seminal paper on information security about 60 years ago.

One Time Pads have other problems, of course (including the human-generated ones that the British encountered during WW2), which is why people started tinkering with Stream Ciphers, which in turn have other problems.