If You Can’t Break Crypto, Break the Client: Recovery of Plaintext iMessage Data

Re:If You Can’t Break Crypto, Break the Client: Recovery of ... by swordswinger12 on Friday April 08, 2016 @04:09PM (#11457514)

You're falling victim to the same misconception. It is not a contradiction to say both that a cryptographic scheme is provably secure and that its security relies on a conjecture about the hardness of a computational problem.

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Re:If You Can’t Break Crypto, Break the Client: Recovery of ... by statictype on Saturday April 09, 2016 @12:14AM (#11459867)

If the conjecture turns out to be false, is the scheme still secure?

If so - interesting, how does that work?

If not - then doesn't that mean it's not probably secure?

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Re:If You Can’t Break Crypto, Break the Client: Recovery of ... by swordswinger12 on Saturday April 09, 2016 @01:36AM (#11460102)

Ehhhh.... well, it's complicated. For most cryptosystems, the answer is no, because if you can solve the underlying problem efficiently you can break the security of the scheme as defined. It turns out that this isn't always a 'break' in the sense that most people understand it. For example, a 'break' might just mean the ciphertext is no longer indistinguishable from random noise, but it might be possible to prove meaningful security in a weakened model that doesn't require ciphertexts to look like random noise but, for example, requires that no bits of the plaintext are leaked with high probability. Cryptographers build schemes with very strong, conservative security guarantees for this exact reason.

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