From: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 94 15:00:14 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: cyphertext-only remailers / cryptanalysis code ?
In-Reply-To: <199411222102.NAA26773@infinity.c2.org>
Message-ID: <199411222300.SAA27179@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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Alex Strasheim writes:
> One solution that I've thought about is only passing messages which are 
> composed of cyphertext.  Does this make any sense?  

This sounds useful, but I'm curious how you would enforce it. I would think 
you'd need to do some nontrivial statistical analysis to be reasonably sure 
you weren't allowing various binaries, uuencoded files, etc. with faked PGP
headers, without preventing people from using other encryption schemes. I'd
say this is the flip side of the challenge faced by governments trying to
outlaw transmissions using strong crypto.

Incidentally, I'd love to get pointers to online pieces of code which
perform various statistical tests on data to find patterns characteristic 
of particular encryption schemes, &c. for cryptanalysis.  I want to 
cryptanalyze a couple of encryption algorithms and would like to do some
experimental work.  Please send me mail directly and I will summarize to
the list later on. My starting points are Applied Crypto, the CEB, and Tim's 
Cyphernomicon.

     -L. Futplex McCarthy; use "Subject: remailer-help" for an autoreply
PGP key by finger or server; "Better watch what you say, or they'll be calling
you a radical...a liberal" --Supertramp  "[CIA/KGB mole Aldrich Ames] took 
information in shopping bags out the front door" --miscellaneous Congressperson

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