Adding padding to PGP files

Hal hfinney at shell.portal.com
Thu Feb 2 21:15:55 PST 1995


From: Nobody at eniac.ac.siue.edu (Anonymous)
> > Date: Thu, 2 Feb 1995 08:48:49 -0800
> > From: Hal <hfinney at shell.portal.com>
> > 
> > It only works on binary ".pgp" public-key encrypted files (not ascii armored
> > files).  So there would be some work needed to make it a really useful tool.
> > 
> > Hal
> 
>   I just tried adding random characters at the end of a pgp ascii
> armoured message.  I had to cut out the checksum, but pgp was able to
> decrypt the message just fine.  So a very simple program (ideally with
> a strong source of random numbers) should be able to pad ascii
> armoured files.

Unfortunately, this approach is easy but doesn't really succeed in adding
undetectable padding.  The PGP message, once the ascii armor is stripped
away, has a byte count in it.  Anyone can de-armor the message and see
that this byte count does not match the size of the file.  So you also
need to bump this byte count to match the added bytes.  That's all my
perl script does that I posted.

Hal






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