From: "Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer]" <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 05:10:10 +0800
To: Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: (eternity) Eternity as a secure filesystem/backup medium
In-Reply-To: <199801181433.JAA13137@the-great-machine.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.3.96.980118120559.31709E-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



...
> (provided back door attacks, fundamental breakthroughs in cryptography, etc. 
> are not made...a bet I'm forced to make, even though I don't like it)

You can tilt the odds in your favor some at the cost of speed; use more rounds
for the block ciphers and base your public-key security on two hard problems,
not one (i.e., encrypt randomness with one public-key cryptosystem and encrypt
the key XORed with this randomness with an algorithm based on an unrelated hard
problem). That means much more work, but the insurance against improvements in
math/crypto is worth it, I'd think.

...
> Actually, Eternity is no different than emailing a file, given a SIGINT
> capability at the attacker which allows all internet traffic to be monitored.
> If the data is still relevant and worth breaking in 50 years, they could
> just intercept the encrypted email, store it in a government vault for
> 50 years, then attack it...

It *is* a little different, actually; confidential messages are rarely relevant
in 50 years (and even when they are, NSA doesn't know which messages are
relevant and which aren't), whereas authors must remain anonymous until they're
sufficiently dead that they can't be hurt (and NSA *does* have more of an idea
of which documents need to be looked into, since they know their contents).

...
> 
> - -- 
> Ryan Lackey
> rdl@mit.edu
> http://mit.edu/rdl/		


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Randall Farmer
    rfarmer@hiwaay.net
    http://hiwaay.net/~rfarmer