Re:Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour
by fhars on Friday May 14, 2010 @04:51AM
(#1346902)
If you were interesting to them, they would just have copied the disks while they were in the mail system. An OTP transmitted over a vulnerable channel like the postal service is not that strong, you have to exchange it in person.
Re:Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour
by eru on Friday May 14, 2010 @09:29AM
(#1347262)
You can just exchange a few floppy disks worth of random bits over various channels, e.g. some postal, some by email, some over the phone, some Diffie-Hellman key exchanges in public and so on. At the end you just XOR them all together, to get the real key. That way all of your channels have to be compromised for your encryption to break.
A floppy disk worth of IRC chat is actually quite a lot but it also had a 'degraded mode' which used the last chunk of the random data as a symmetric cypher key. That would keep things going until the next disk arrived in the post.
This just goes to show that if you are stupid enough to tell a geek what the best answer is then there is a pretty good chance that they will confuse it with the right answer.
My only hope is that our inane chats about movies are, even now, causing cycles to be burned on a NSA supercomputer somewhere :-)