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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:20
Alex Alten (Alten@Home.Com)
Sat, 03 Apr 1999 15:13:47 -0800
At 09:13 AM 4/2/99 -0600, Bruce Schneier wrote:
>
>You are free to consider it to be what you like, but you have to understand
>that you will continue to be ridiculed in the community. RC4 is an OFB
>stream cipher. So is whatever-it-is that you use.
>
You are right, we have been ridiculed in the community. Your news letter
and web site have been prominent in stating that it is "snake oil". And,
as a fact, our early implementation efforts have had less strength than we
had originally estimated. However it is a fundamental cipher, and if we
fail to come up with a way to generate and manage the random pad bytes
properly, then someone else will. In the 80 years since Gilbert Vernam
invented it a lot has happened. The broad technology trends are acres of
memory, lots of cheap microprocessors, and a sea of network availability
and bandwidth. Together these make a practical, efficient implementation
of it possible. Within 20 or 30 years it will probably dominate products
using cryptography, pushing PK and block ciphers into niche areas.
- Alex
--Alex Alten
Alten@Home.Com Alten@TriStrata.Com
P.O. Box 11406 Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA (925) 417-0159
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:20