From: Peter F Cassidy <pcassidy@world.std.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 7eebd0dee698ea1da02bf74efc46976e70eee626b555be272b9900da66f08215
Message ID: <Pine.3.89.9501021008.A20482-0100000@world.std.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1995-01-02 15:27:25 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 2 Jan 95 07:27:25 PST
From: Peter F Cassidy <pcassidy@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 95 07:27:25 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: exponential relationship of crytographer and cryptanalyst
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9501021008.A20482-0100000@world.std.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
- I'm writing a piece on the politics of surveillance/privacy
technologies for OMNI, essentially a survey of their advance since the
1967 proposal for the National Data Center. I cover cryptography,
deriving the narrative from Clipper Chip initiative. The point I'm trying
to make is that given the market forces pushing commerce onto the public
networks and the increasing power of available encryption, the cold war
national apparatus will have to mobilize quickly a la digital telephony
to stomp it - yet the nature of computing puts them in a loosing position
in the long run. Toward the latter part of this thesis, I've been told -
and want check with youz - of the exponential relationship of
crytographer and cryptanalyst. The heart of this relationship has been
explained to me as follows: Increasing the key by one bit effectively
doubles the number of keys and proportionally increases the power
required to break it in a brute force attack. Is this true? Is there a
truer way of stating it? Are there complicating factors this excludes
that I should discuss?
- Regards,
- Peter Cassidy
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