From: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 95 10:02:18 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: How do I know if its encrypted?
In-Reply-To: <9501130137.AA03281@eri.erinet.com>
Message-ID: <199501131800.KAA02934@largo.remailer.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   At 10:08 PM 1/11/95 -0800, Eric Hughes wrote:
   > ... Seems to me that a quite reasonable condition of use of a remailer is
   >that what is passed isn't human readable.

   From: pstemari@erinet.com (Paul J. Ste. Marie)

   Perhaps I missed this, but why?  If someone is going to plant
   kiddie porn or whatever on you, does it really matter if they
   encrypt it first or not?

If you can't read it, it's not kiddie-porn *for you*, although it
might be for someone with the key.

Encryption fragments meaning subjectively.  A magazine, for example,
has a fixed center of meaning for all who can read the language.  A
magazine looks the same to all who look at it.  An encrypted file
looks different to those who have the key from those who do not.

Encrypted data is fundamentally different from paper-and-ink data in
this way.  The metaphor of "planting it on somebody" does not apply to
data that the "somebody" can't read.

   I forget the name of the cypher (Vigere, perhaps--the one that uses
   a series of Caesar-like cyphers keyed by a password), but you could
   just run it through that with a password of
   abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and you'd flatten out the distribution
   enough to get it by casual inspection.

Fine.  It think that would suffice.  If you can't easily read it, you
can't be expected to have read it.  The operator of a data service has
_zero_ motivation to cryptanalyze something.  If they happen to apply
a viewer to the file (for whatever reason), they don't _want_ to see
what's inside.

Eric