[Cryptography] Imitation Game: Can Enigma/Tunney be Fixed?

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Fri Jan 9 09:22:37 EST 2015


Crypto software is not the weakness, it's the complex hardware
required to process and transceive. Consider the weight of all
that from end to end and it surely exceeds WW2 tech. A digitally
secure message travels a vast physical apparatus with innumerable
opportunities for meddling, from keyboard to cable to router to
ISP to network, to switches, to sats, undersea optics, to the
down stream destination. Radio was much simpler, and advanced
versions of it are used for high-grade military security. A microdot
on a sheet of paper too. Digital code is extremely fragile and
vulnerable in analog reality, total dependent on potentially hostile
hosts -- sysadmin and sysengineering.

There is a growing gap between crypto software and its related hardware
due to the Maginot Line overvaluation of software and underevaluation of
Panzer Tank hardware. Vanity about software defenses appears to be
a growing delusion against hardware attacks.

Math and code, meet your foe: physics and engineering backed
by a huge amount of money. Code dancing on heads of pins is
bedazzling but in the end no better than angelic faith in end to
end crypto.

At 11:01 PM 1/8/2015, you wrote:

>A physical machine is so last century.Â
>
>All the improvements to Enigma can be done in software (modeled).
>Portable and battery powered machines are way easy to obtain
>and that includes booting a laptop from a USB stick for aÂ
>limited well controlled environment. Â
>
>The ultimate problem is to find a way to make the use of encryption
>easy, ubiquitous and reliable. Â  Â  Companies like Sony would have done
>well to use a crypto system even if it was as weak as Enigma was.
>
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>Â
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