What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by tialaramex on Sunday March 12, 2017 @05:00AM (#13849907)

Devices that produce a trickle of truly random numbers can be produced for a few bucks. They're included in modern CPUs, for example.

But that was never the problem. The problem is, now what? To use this OTP you need to securely deliver pads to everybody you'll ever send a message to. So, OTP is practical for a handful of secret agents who'll receive messages of a few dozen words per year from a single controller, and useless for most of us in the real world.

_This_ problem is why we have public key cryptography.

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Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by eru on Sunday March 12, 2017 @09:12AM (#13850500)

Snarkily: a one time pad reduces the problem of exchanging secret messages to exchanging secret keys of the same length..

The only thing that OTP buys you is that you can exchange the pads at your convenience any time before.

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Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by andai on Sunday March 12, 2017 @01:39PM (#13851859)

You only need to meet once.

With a few GB (a couple bucks in a supermarket will buy a 8GB usb stick) you can communicate in text about 16 thousand books worth of words.

In other words, to deplete the pad you would have to write sixteen thousand books.

I think that's pretty convenient, as far as literally unbreakable encryption goes!

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Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works by eru on Sunday March 12, 2017 @01:49PM (#13851917)

Oh, definitely. The convenience of being able to secure your communication in advance is great.

It's just that key-sharing is basically the most complicated and vulnerable part of modern cryptography.

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