Derek Zahn says:
....................I've gotten a number of responses of the form "Why not just claim that an encrypted message is data?", but my original point was Plausible Deniability. That is, I was postulating an environment in which Big Brother has outlawed cryptography. Now, confronted with a confiscated message, the sender has to defend himself from the Inquisition. Can't just claim it's a sound file; the Inquisitor will want it played. The question I'm trying to answer is how to produce on demand a causal explanation of data (which actually contains an encrypted message) that satisfies an investigator and doesn't reveal the encrypted message. Some simple scheme like, "Uh, it's the result of my new random number generation algorithm" isn't likely to be *satisfying* and is certain to produce the response, "OK, let's see the algorithm."
Yes, a very valid point. But it seems to me, that Random Data claim is the best, with the highest chances to keep one out of trouble (if anything can :-). The algorithm? Oh, sorry, but it's a HARDWARE random data generator! And if it's truly good random gen, there are no patterns to track... One can use it to create huge one-time pads, BTW... "Salt" some of the encrypted (or plaintext :-) messages with those... The only thing to be concerned of - the cipher [to be claimed a random data] shouldn't be crackable, and SHOULDN'T have any patterns! Or they could present an evidence, that the data isn't a product of your random gen... -- Regards, Uri uri@watson.ibm.com scifi!angmar!uri N2RIU ----------- <Disclamer>
From cypherpunks-request Thu Mar 11 12:44:24 1993