The Manual One-Time Pad

Re:The Manual One-Time Pad by _fizz_buzz_ on Sunday August 23, 2015 @01:01PM (#10106005)

Here is the thing, the cryptography is really not the weak part of a communication system. You really don't gain anything by using a one-time pad over something like AES-256 in any practical sense. You're only making the part of your system stronger that is already more than strong enough (From a thermodynamics point of view you couldn't even brute force AES-256 if you had a supernova as an energy source [1]). Difficult parts of a secure communication system are authentication, key-exchange, etc.

Example how to compromise your system: I send your friend a message with some random data and pretend to be you. Now he doesn't know what's going on and you two are out of sync and cannot securely re-sync your keys without meeting up again.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_...

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Re:The Manual One-Time Pad by ryacko on Sunday August 23, 2015 @02:00PM (#10106221)

You can bruteforce AES-256 if you were using a quantum computer.

Or if there's a new advance in algebraic cryptanalysis.

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Re:The Manual One-Time Pad by _fizz_buzz_ on Sunday August 23, 2015 @02:34PM (#10106322)

> You can bruteforce AES-256 if you were using a quantum computer.

Not true. AES does not suffer from the same weaknesses as many public key schemes. A quantum computer could speed up an attack on AES, but does not fundamentally break it.

> Or if there's a new advance in algebraic cryptanalysis.

Sure. But my point was that there are much weaker points than the encryption in a communication system.

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