At 08:15 PM 11/19/98 -0500, Bill Stewart wrote:
Encryption is NOT just "mathematics, period". It's mathematics, plus operations, password management, key distribution, keeping track of who's allowed to see what, plus hardware and operating systems to run the mathematics on, and unless you're running it in wetware, it's also computer security to protect the hardware and operating systems. And it's black operations to go out and steal the other guys' hardware and keys and yellow-sticky-notes and crack their OSs.
Actually, to a sufficiently advanced civilization, these are all describable with mathematics.
In some contexts, especially real people's contexts, your PC may be a fine place to run the encryption, but in an NSA / DoD context, especially when there's a war on, the safest way to manage many of these things is to use dedicated tamper-resistant hardware with the users on one side
Nota bene: tamper-detection + zeroizing >> tamper resistance. --Pasty aliens spied my mugs