Does anyone with access to the Financial Times know what the hell this snippet is talking about??
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ENCRYPTION BREAKTHROUGH ANNOUNCED TODAY August 24, 1998
According to the Financial Times a new "unbreakable" encryption technology, called the "Cramer-Shoup cryptosystem," will be annouced today by mathematicians from the International Federal Institute of Technology which supposedly will thwart even the most aggressive Internet hackers. They claim to have created the first "unbreakable protection" which would reportedly be a breakthrough that could ensure the security of electronic commerce. The Financial Times said, "The breakthrough comes amid growing anxiety about the vulnerability of Internet transactions since the discovery by researchers earlier this year of a new way to break through even the strongest encryption systems."
Who would have guessed that a journalist would so grievously misrepresent the claims of a soberly presented scholarly report? The title of the technical paper is: "A Practical Public Key Cryptosystem Provably Secure against Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext Attack". The only new claim is security against a chosen ciphertext attack, not "unbreakable". The specific internet angle is that an attacker might have access to a "decryption oracle" due to the nature of high volume anonymous transactions. If one could slip through a few million adaptively chosen ciphertexts, current systems could leak enough information to compromise themselves. The reported results are for a new proposed system that is not vulnerable to this sort of attack. Steve Bryan Vendorsystems International email: sbryan@vendorsystems.com icq: 5263678 pgp fingerprint: D758 183C 8B79 B28E 6D4C 2653 E476 82E6 DA7C 9AC5