On Sun, 3 Sep 2000, Marcello 'R.D.O.' Magnifico wrote:
3. I expected a lot of tech issues and found instead a bunch of: -discussions on racism, religion, gov't behavior worldwide -"we hate pigs" -US local laws discussions (see 1) -simple fluff and/or flaming.
I'm with him, actually, about list content. I had hoped to find tech discussions going on. In the interest of making some news if you don't like the news you're getting, I present -- the Country Mile Cipher. Algorithm details available (for now) on http://www.sonic.net/~bear/crypto/countrymile.html This is a stream cipher based on the Blum-Blum-Shub pseuodo- random number generator -- and on work done more recently by Ronald Rivest, who "digitally sealed" a message that he expects to take 30 years of continuous computing to unscramble. The Country Mile Cipher has one interesting property; You can choose when you encrypt a message how much computing power it will require to decrypt it. This interesting property has two useful applications: First, you can make it that much more difficult to "brute-force" a key, so even if you are restricted in key length, you can still achieve reasonable security. Second, you can use it to "digitally seal" messages to people that will not unseal without a specified amount of computing time. I can foresee protocols where someone not having information for a specified length of time after it's delivered would be useful - It could be treated as a "bit commitment scheme" where the person making the commitment does not need to do anything else. Anyway - there's very little here that's my own invention. The Blum-Blum-Shub Random Number Generator is well-tested, and the mathematics for predicting its state into the future are explained in Schnier's book. I haven't really done anything except put some well-known and well-tested pieces together, so I'm pretty confident of the security of the Country Mile Cipher. So confident, in fact, that if anyone can come up with a viable attack on it, I will cheerfully pay the *first* person to do so fifty US dollars. :-) Ray Dillinger