[Cryptography] When your security is too secure

[Jon Callas]

> On Nov 25, 2025, at 00:43, Michael Kjörling <9bf3a7ef93bb at ewoof.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> It is also a question of time. If the current time is late evening and
> the message is "attack Port Hill at dawn", then A is fairly important
> (loss of A means no attack, with whatever consequences follow from
> that); I is important (you really don't want the receiver to read the
> message as "attack Fort Hill at dawn" and be in the wrong place); but
> C really only matters until sunrise, and becomes significantly less
> valuable after that time. On the other hand, as time goes on, I might
> become _more_ important; if someone later writes a documentary work on
> the battle, or if who did what and why comes into question, _what_
> happened _when_ becomes more important than keeping the message
> secret, but loss of A (losing any single message) is less likely to
> impact the overall picture. This is something that is also sometimes
> overlooked or ignored in an idealistic world; that for the exact same
> message, the relative ordering of the elements within the C-I-A triad
> can (and often does) change over time.

Exactly, the observation that C is often time-bounded is an old one. Certainly in such a case, you want most importantly the message to get there (Availability). Your point about the proper message is spot on, and at the same time, the Integrity parts are in a weird place. 

When an inevitable discussion of one-time pads comes up, a primary "yes, but" is that they have zero integrity; they are malleable. A counter to that observation is that the modality in lots of communications makes that really close to irrelevant. It's mostly unimportant in a numbers station or message-passing via courier because usefully mangling the message is tantamount to breaking the cipher. In systems like the internet, where there are routers, malleability becomes more real.

Nonetheless, these sorts of urgent messages really, really want the message to be delivered and not dropped. 

	Jon