On Fri, 20 Oct 1995 02:45:28 -0500, walrus wrote: it is claimed to be an OTP. Imagine a plaintext, encrypted with triple-des. It looks like a bunch of 1's and 0's to the casual observer, but to you it is your secret plan to take over the world. Or so you would have us believe if we crack the cypher. actually you plan to take over the world using a completely different plan. It is quite easy to take the bits of the des-encrypted message, and calculate the OTP key nessasary to decrypt the message into your real plan. Yes, but if you _really_ used a OTP to encrypt your real plans, the probability that the ciphertext would decrypt via DES to anything intelligible is so amazingly minute that no one would believe you. It's like _one_ monkey typing out flawlessly the complete works of Shakespeare. On a Wednesday afternoon... :-) using that particular key means nothing, because a true OTP can generate that bit sequence. And I can instantly break any encrypted message I see, by correctly guessing the algorithm and the key. I'd bet against it, though. In fact, I don't even need to see it!! I can guess the ciphertext, too :-) -- Paul Foley <mycroft@actrix.gen.nz> --- PGPmail preferred PGP key ID 0x1CA3386D available from keyservers fingerprint = 4A 76 83 D8 99 BC ED 33 C5 02 81 C9 BF 7A 91 E8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, it is damn near zero. -- David Ellis