cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1997-12-04 - Re: Superdistribution development/release

Header Data

From: “Brian W. Buchanan” <brian@smarter.than.nu>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Message Hash: 9020965ab2d839820ba8c116a0f6a1cbe4bb2e3139e1f39dba1aa745d04560fb
Message ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971203185703.204B-100000@thought.calbbs.com>
Reply To: <v03007800b0abc492abcc@[168.161.105.216]>
UTC Datetime: 1997-12-04 03:13:16 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 11:13:16 +0800

Raw message

From: "Brian W. Buchanan" <brian@smarter.than.nu>
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 11:13:16 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Superdistribution development/release
In-Reply-To: <v03007800b0abc492abcc@[168.161.105.216]>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971203185703.204B-100000@thought.calbbs.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> 
> Here an incentive: if anyone breaks this, I'll write an article about it
> and another profiling the person who does.
> 
> When you have this kind of "encryption" scheme running on untrusted
> hardware to which the user has access, it's doomed to fail. Even if it's
> custom hardware, it'll probably be broken, but it'll just take longer.

Should be relatively trivial to break the encryption, since it can't be
over 40-bit (or 56-bit if the company joined the kiss-ass alliance).
Probably just as easy or easier to disassemble the software or do some
creative tweaking of Windows DLLs to intercept data.  Custom hardware is
probably out due to cost and distribution problems, and even with it, it's
still possible to intercept data between the hardware and the software, or
the software and the OS.

-- 
Brian Buchanan                                      brian@smarter.than.nu

No security through obscurity!  Demand full source code!
4.4BSD for the masses - http://www.freebsd.org

Thread