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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21
Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com)
Mon, 05 Apr 1999 13:00:14 -0500
At 03:13 PM 4/3/99 -0800, Alex Alten wrote:
>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.
Stream ciphers are definitely preferable for bulk encryption; I don't think
anyont believes otherwise.
The random bad bytes nonsense is just that: nonsense. We've written a
paper that breaks much of those schemes, including the system that you
probably use.
Bruce
**********************************************************************
Bruce Schneier, President, Counterpane Systems Phone: 612-823-1098
101 E Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis, MN 55419 Fax: 612-823-1590
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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21