[Cryptography] PGP -- Can someone help me understand something?

Tom Mitchell mitch at niftyegg.com
Sat Aug 11 19:30:10 EDT 2018


On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 11:45 PM, Matt Maxson <matt at maxsons.org> wrote:
>
> This is a really basic question, but I'm posting it here because I don't
> know where else to start.  I'll welcome any sort of help, but certainly
> don't mind links to articles or someone telling me to go google this or
> that term.  I don't know enough to even start searching.
>

Your question is a good one.
Part of the answer is in your question:   "I don't know enough to even
start searching." and that is part of what makes a good
system hard to crack.

Another is that it looks easy if you know the answer (have the key)  but as
the study of math shows solving a class of problems can
make you famous because they are difficult.
Open a calculus text book to find famous theorem after theorem (discovery)
that once mastered allows problems to be solved.

In one analogy attempt I might take a gold coin and bury it in the sand of
a beach.   I paced the location so I can find it again.
If you know the X+Y coordinates you have a chance.  If my pace length is
unique you might never find it.   Is the location Polar
or Cartesian.  Is it Y,X or X,Y  Is the angle of the grid clock and date
based... what system did I use?

Fast forward to modern tools, if I take a file and cutters to the gold coin
so I have a lot of bits then scatter them in the sand in a systematic way I
should
be able to recover the date of the coin and name the face on the coin in
the future.    Lacking that system the message on the coin is almost
impossible to recover from the sand.   Gold easy because it is heavy and
might be recovered with a gold pan but to
get the entire coin someone would have to inspect a lot of sand with a gold
pan. The entire beach is a lot of sand.

The encryption space for these modern methods is larger than the count of
all the grains of sand in all the beaches.

Tomorrow some insight might make pudding of all this.  Read "Programming
Perls" for insight into how methods
can reduce some problems to easy.    If you crack this you might get
famous... ;-)  But most likely will have your method classified
as secret and find  it scrubbed from the record.

-- 
  T o m    M i t c h e l l
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