At 8:16 PM -0700 7/21/96, Simon Spero wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jul 1996, David Sternlight wrote:
It's not a "monkeys in the British Museum" problem, since when you hit the right key sequences both encrypted text streams will fall cleanly out--otherwise the chances are overwhelming (given a decently long run) that one of the two streams will contain garbles or more likely be complete gibberish.
Not with one-time-pads... the key is as long as the plaintext. Our Hamlet writing monkeys will produce, amongst others, numerous versions of the play where the prince's name is telmaH. As well as vastly more where the monkeys get all the way to the last sentence and then
One-Time-Pads offer perfect security as long as they're only used once. If they're used more than once, they're not one-time-pads.
This is getting silly. I made a comment about brute force search, explained what I meant, and now some want to pick nits about semantics. My meaning was clear. Things called "one time pads" have been broken when they were reused. Breaking them is a matter of brute force search and checking both decrypt streams for plaintext. If they are used correctly and not reused, that approach isn't available. End of story. David