[Cryptography] [cryptography] Paris Attacks Blamed on Strong Cryptography and Edward Snowden

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Tue Dec 1 16:56:34 EST 2015


At 01:23 PM 12/1/2015, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>> "Mr. Abaaoud ... had given Mr. Hame an email address to reach him on and a USB stick with an encryption key he was to download on his computer."
>
>Fuller context:  "He had given Mr. Hame an email address to reach him on and a USB stick with an encryption key he was to download on his computer.  Mr. Abaaoud had promised further instructions by email on where to obtain weapons for the attack and which specific concert hall to strike."

The last time I looked, it was difficult to buy a USB stick with less than 8GBytes.  As I write this, it may be difficult to buy a USB stick with less than 16GBytes.

16GBytes worth of *one-time pad* should certainly have been sufficient for all of whatever communications these terrorists engaged in since 1/1/2015:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

"Storage media such as thumb drives, DVD-Rs or personal digital audio players can be used to carry a very large one-time-pad from place to place in a non-suspicious way"

"The key material must be securely disposed of after use, to ensure the key material is never reused and to protect the messages sent" [I'm not sure that these guys were too worried about reuse.]

Heck, these terrorists might have had enough keying material for all of the comms to have been in *video*; HD video if the USB stick had had 128GB on it.

So how do Mr. Comey, Mr. Vance and Ms. May plan to "back door" one-time pads?  NSA's quantum computer?  Bring it on!

As someone on the Internet commented, some of the terrorists have likely already perished from laughter after hearing some of these politicians' proposals.



More information about the cryptography mailing list