(receipient list snipped) Jim Choate wrote:
check back in the archives, early october last year. you'll find an extensive discussion and several posted algorithms which - while not perfect - should work well enough, especially in the kind of controlled, closed environment that the original poster is working with.
Which of the three list archives?
my fault. cypherpunks.
I'm subscribers to all three of the major lists you sent this to and NONE of them (especially if you're talking about the moronic discussion on cypherpunks from a couple of months ago - where NOTHING, especially no working algorithms were discussed) have ever demonstrated a single algorithm that can decide if an arbitrary block of symbols is encrypted or not (unless of course you know a priori by pre-defining it, which isn't the same problem as you describe at all).
you are the one missing the point by about, uh, the size of mexico. the original poster of this thread had a specific problem. it doesn't matter if an algorithm satisfies some arbitrary and, to be brutally honest, mental-masturbation definition of perfect cryptography detection. incidently, since he is working in a closed environment and CAN dictate the crypto to be used (within limits, such as the requirement that the software for it be available on all used platforms), the very requirement you mention as the critical is in fact not only uncritical, but not even a problem.
Ah, now you change the rules of the game with 'controlled environment'. That wasnt' in your first description. I told you there was no such algorithm.
you should really go back and read the thread with this subject line from the very beginning. we are NOT talking about any pipe-dream "detects any imaginable form of crypto" algorithm, which I will agree can not exist. this thread is about a very specific problem and possible solutions.