Edward Bertsch says:
->calling attention to the message BECAUSE it is encrypted? "If he went to ->the trouble of coding it, there MUST be something in there!!" Granted that ->if everyone begins encrypting, this problem will vanish... are there ->practical solutions in the meantime? (eg, Codes that look like plaintext?)
Well, my opinion is - the only way to go is to SHORTEN the transition period. Switch to all-encrypted e-mail ASAP.
a good point indeed. I know of no software that works the way it seems you would like. ............................................This sounds like a VERY difficult problem, and one that is not likely to be solved any time soon (in the sense of having this be done 100% by software).
Agreed. Theoretically possible - practically infeasible. Plus imagine message size... Plus it depends on how clever a scanner-program can be - if eavesdroppers have enough CPU power, they could check for the "validity" as well, i.e. right word sequences, not just amount...
Another option would be to have the message fit the letter-frequency, letter-pair frequency, etc... that 'normal' messages have. The idea here is that messages may be scanned for unusual (i.e. non-english text) properties in this regard, and then scanned further by humans and/or computers in the order of their 'interestingness'. So to defeat this kind of scanning, your 'secret' message should 'appear' to be a 'ordinary' message.
Again, it will, or will not work, depending on how smart the scanning program is. There's no reason why it can't detect, that your letters don't form valid English (German, Swedish, Arabic, whatever) words, *or* the words don't form valid sentences... I repeat - the surest way is to get over the hump sooner. -- Regards, Uri uri@watson.ibm.com scifi!angmar!uri N2RIU ----------- <Disclamer>
From cypherpunks-request Tue Jan 5 10:49:28 1993