From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 06:02:30 +0800
To: "wabe" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: e-mail muddling.
In-Reply-To: <008801bd22cf$131ec440$ab8588d1@justice>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980118125130.00836aa0@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 02:35 PM 1/16/98 -0800, wabe wrote:
>    --
>Also wouldn't it be easier to de-muddle an e-mail
>message than a brute force attack?  I mean,
>you KNOW what muddled it.  And you know
>the general way it got muddled.  It's not pgp,
>it's just some line breaks a bit too early for their
>time...

Not particularly.  If the muddler wraps all lines at
N characters, then you can guess that all lines N characters long
can probably be put back together, which isn't hard,
but if it also loses any white space (e.g. trailing spaces)
then you've got exponentially many possibilities.
It may be worth trying to fix a couple of the easy ones, though.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639