purloined letter

[Edward Bertsch]

->calling attention to the message BECAUSE it is encrypted? "If he went to
->the trouble of coding it, there MUST be something in there!!" Granted that
->if everyone begins encrypting, this problem will vanish... are there
->practical solutions in the meantime? (eg, Codes that look like plaintext?)

a good point indeed.  I know of no software that works the way it seems
you would like.  The best would be encryption software that makes your
'secret' message look like the kind of message that you would actually
be sending to the recipient.  Some kind of message that (when read by
a human) makes sense, and seems innocuous.  This sounds like a VERY
difficult problem, and one that is not likely to be solved any time soon
(in the sense of having this be done 100% by software).

Another option would be to have the message fit the letter-frequency,
letter-pair frequency, etc... that 'normal' messages have.  The idea
here is that messages may be scanned for unusual (i.e. non-english text)
properties in this regard, and then scanned further by humans and/or
computers in the order of their 'interestingness'.  So to defeat this
kind of scanning, your 'secret' message should 'appear' to be a 'ordinary'
message.

--

Edward A. Bertsch (eab at msc.edu)   Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.
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