[Cryptography] XOR linked list & crypto

[Peter Gutmann]

Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> writes:

>Have these features/drawbacks been used in any encryption scheme?

How would you use them in an encryption scheme?  Given that the pointers will
have very low entropy and in some cases be entirely predictable (malloc'd
entries in a linked list of fixed size), you'd get pretty poor security.
You'd have to have a random IV at the start, but then you're mostly reusing it
on each link pointer due to the near-zero entropy contributed by each link, so
it wouldn't offer much security.

Peter.