Digital Cash

[Graham Toal]

:internet nodes around somewhere...). While the might of bands like 
:Paranoimia, Skid Row, and Razor 1911 are usually concentrated on games, 
:their expertise applies equally well to "serious" software - it's just 
:that games are more marketable/popular and thus get the crackers' names 
:to more people.
::PS - the example above is an overestimate - it often happens that 
:software is cracked and distributed within HOURS of release.

There is a *considerable* difference between kiddy hackers breaking
game protection, and breaking a cryptographically secure protocol.

What the kiddy hackers do is try to unravel layers of security through
obscurity.  With the kind of problem we're talking about, all the code
is actually released into the public domain, available for inspection.
The security resides in things like the difficulty of inverting complex
1:1 hash functions which were modified by a secret key, or of factoring
the products of large primes, which has been shown to be beyond our
best mathematicians, and these spotty little kids *ain't* our best
mathematicians, by a long chalk.

G