[Cryptography] mathematical constants

[Peter Gutmann]

Christian Huitema <huitema at huitema.net> writes:

>Imaging an attacker willing to try finding one of the multiple thousands
>"well known pieces of text" until finding one that meets the desired goal...

Good point, the "is father dead or deceased" problem [0].  But then again
since irrational numbers are infinite series you can just walk down as large a
cataloge of those as you have available until you find the pattern you need.

Having said that, at some point you're just chasing down phantoms.  If you
want to backdoor something you do all the stuff Snowden showed us the NSA did,
which gets you all the plaintext all the time, and then don't have to bother
with trying to introduce some infinitesimal bias into something, hoping it
gets adopted, and recovering a few bits of plaintext through it once a blue
moon.

Peter.

[0] https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/publications/FOLDER_245/41748799078803.pdf,
    bottom of p.217.