Cracking Linksys “Encryption”

Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by willvarfar on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @01:50AM (#7338886)

ROT13 and XOR are encryption. This is crypto101. With a username like yours, you ought to give some books on the subject a cursory glance, at least at their first chapter where they always start with some chap called Caesar ;)

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by rurounijones on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @03:41AM (#7339130)

Depends on the definition of "encryption".

It looks like GP's definition of "encryption" does not include childish stuff like RO13 and XOR.

Is his definition technically accurate? No, but then words are malleable and companies hiding behind "technically accurate" in their marketing blurb is never a good thing.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by dspillett on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @05:35AM (#7339437)

> Is his definition technically accurate? No, but then words are malleable

I've taken to calling simple XOR/Rot based schemes like that "encoding" instead then encryption, as it would seem have others, as they are essentially static alphabet changes - converting ANSI to UCS or UTF16 would be almost as effective. Of course marketing are going to use the best sounding word they can in any small way justify rather than caring about any disconnect between reality and what things actually mean to the people they are marketing to.

Obfuscation is another work I'd use for such simple schemes. They have much the same effect as code obfuscation: they hide something from the most casual of viewers but offer no protection at all against anyone with five minutes to spare.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by willvarfar on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @06:08AM (#7339553)

The words encryption and obfuscation do not contain any overtones of their complexities.

You would rename the Caesar Cipher to be Caesar Encoding? Not going to fly.

Any encryption where the password is public knowledge is just obfuscation. So if these backups were AESed, reversed, RC4ed, bzipped and then DES3ed ... that'd just be time-consuming obfuscation.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by josephlord on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @05:13AM (#7339381)

I would argue ROT13 isn't encryption as there is no key (it is just defined within the algorithm). Simple XOR with a constant is (bad) encryption and the constant is the key..

The Caesar cipher is encryption because the shift is the key.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by eterm on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @08:41AM (#7340056)

ROT13 is just like XOR; The "key" is "NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKLM". In the same way in this case the XOR "key" was just 0xFFFFFFFF.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by SEMW on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @09:32AM (#7340340)

I think josephlord's point was that the name "ROT13" completely specifies the 'key': If you changed that, it would no longer be ROT13. So it arguably can't be considered a key if you define 'key' to mean 'a piece of information additional to knowing the algorithm used that is necessary to decrypt'. (If the 'algorithm used' was specified just as ROT (i.e. caesar cypher) then 13 would be a key). But this is basically semantics.

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Re:Cracking Linksys “Encryption” by crypt1d on Tuesday March 04, 2014 @03:29AM (#7339093)

Never said wasn't, just that we came a long way since the Roman era ;)

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