Is this as insecure as it sounds (was FWD: Complete Fax Privacy Draws C
This turned up on alt.anonymous. One would need a technical specification or a working model to be sure, but it sounds like home-grown snake oil to me. My guess is that a nineteenth-century cryptanalyst could crack this, and that the TLAs would have a field day. What do other people think?
Complete Fax Privacy Draws Closer
Individuals receiving faxes, be they of a business or personal nature, will soon be able to encrypt the contents and make them unreadable to people for whom the messages are not intended. The new fax encryption technology has been developed by the University of Rochester in New York. The encryption program would make all faxes unreadable to the naked eye. Only by placing a customized transparent plastic sheet over the message could it be made readable. Each individual, employee or manager would be issued with his own plastic sheet and encryption key ensuring messages are only read by those specified in the message itself. The encryption software would not slow the transmission and reception of fax messages and the cost of installing the system on to existing machines would be minimal. Such software would be indispensable to those whose activities require the utmost confidentiality or privacy. Nosy employees, rivals, those providing faxing services and anybody else who has, until now, had a birds eye view of your fax communications could be successfully abolished from the security equation. Though the software has yet to be refined into a marketable commodity, it is set to be introduced for public consumption in the very near future.
Adam Starchild Asset Protection & Becoming Judgement Proof at http://www.catalog.com/corner/taxhaven
-- Alan Bostick | SWINDON: What will history say? Seeking opportunity to | BURGOYNE: History, sir, will tell lies as usual. develop multimedia content. | George Bernard Shaw, THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE Finger abostick@netcom.com for more info and PGP public key
Alan: On Sun, 31 Dec 1995, Alan L. Bostick wrote:
This turned up on alt.anonymous. One would need a technical specification or a working model to be sure, but it sounds like home-grown snake oil
Sounds like snake oil to me.
Complete Fax Privacy Draws Closer personal nature, will soon be able to encrypt the contents and make them unreadable to people for whom the messages are not
PGP & a fax modem & a good OCR provides this. Or PGP the message and either e-mail or telex it.
placing a customized transparent plastic sheet over the message could it be made readable. Each individual, employee or manager would be issued with his own plastic sheet and encryption key
A plastic sheet is going to let me read it, and nobody else? I guess that would work, if one was using --- I forgotten what it was called, where you cut a number of squares on a sheet of cardboard, put over a sheet of paper, write the characters in the spaces, then lift the sheet, and write garbage to fill up the rest of the sheet, so that nobody else can see what the characters were. I think I was in kindergarten when we did that, untill we discovered that our teacher could read our "secret" messages, without the cardboard sheet. << The handwriting of the real message differed from that of the garbage words. >>
Though the software has yet to be refined into a marketable commodity, it is set to be introduced for public consumption in the very near future.
Is this the same as Jerry Pournelle "real soon now'? I think I'll stick to using PGP and sending e-mail. xan jonathon grafolog@netcom.com **************************************************************** Opinions represented are not necessarilly mine. OTOH, they are not representations of any organization I am affiliated with, either. WebPage: ftp://ftp.netcom.com/gr/graphology/home.html For a good prime, call 391581 * 2^216193 - 1 **********************************************************************
If the plastic sheet is just a fixed mask, then this scheme yields instantly to chosen plain-text (just send an all-black page), really quickly to known-plaintext, and pretty quickly to multiple cyphertexts. There's got to be more to it than that Simon (defun modexpt (x y n) "computes (x^y) mod n" (cond ((= y 0) 1) ((= y 1) (mod x n)) ((evenp y) (mod (expt (modexpt x (/ y 2) n) 2) n)) (t (mod (* x (modexpt x (1- y) n)) n))))
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abostick＠netcom.com -
Jonathan Blake -
Simon Spero