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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01
Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Sun, 23 Aug 1998 17:51:50 -0400
Dutra de Lacerda writes:
> TRUE RANDOM No-Hardware Routine (in Pseudocode)
When I was in college in the early seventies, I devised what I
believed was a brilliant encryption scheme. A simple pseudorandom
number stream was added to the plaintext stream to create
ciphertext. This would seemingly thwart any frequency analysis of
the ciphertext, and would be uncrackable even to the most resourceful
Government intelligence agencies. I felt so smug about my
achievement. So cock-sure.
Years later, I discovered this same scheme in several introductory
cryptography texts and tutorial papers. How nice. Other
cryptographers had thought of the same scheme. Unfortunately, the
scheme was presented as a simple homework assignment on how to use
elementary cryptanalytic techniques to trivially crack it. So much
for my brilliant scheme.
-- Phil Zimmermann in the PGP manual
No, I'm not implying what you've done is a sign that you're an
idiot. However, the issues are not what you think they are.
Perry
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01