Re: The Onion on Lava Lamps

From: kragen@pobox.com
Date: Tue Feb 20 2001 - 01:07:49 PST


Jeff Bone <jbone@jump.net> writes:
> > Of course, if you're up against a big enemy, and they know the type of
> > observation you're doing then they can do the equivalent of a brute force
> > search (record all TV stations, measure all stars, etc.).
>
> That's essentially the same as "generate all possible one-time pads of form X." If
> you can make the problem that hard for "them," you've won. ;-)

It's not at all essentially the same, although you may be correct that
it's good enough. If you find a star that decrypts the message to
something sensible, you can be pretty sure the decryption was correct;
that's not at all true of one-time pads.

The imaginable --- the space of one-time pad keys --- is unimaginably
larger than the universe.

> BTW, my posting this was simply to document that it's been thought

This is a major reason for kragen-tol --- unfortunately, as far as I
know, nobody but me is maintaining archives of it.



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