A Snake-Oil FAQ

[David Sternlight]

At 8:16 PM -0700 7/21/96, Simon Spero wrote:
>On Sun, 21 Jul 1996, David Sternlight wrote:
>>
>> It's not a "monkeys in the British Museum" problem, since when you hit the
>> right key sequences both encrypted text streams will fall cleanly
>> out--otherwise the chances are overwhelming (given a decently long run)
>> that one of the two streams will contain garbles or more likely be complete
>> gibberish.
>
>Not with one-time-pads... the key is as long as the plaintext. Our Hamlet
>writing monkeys will produce, amongst others, numerous versions of the
>play where the prince's name is telmaH. As well as vastly more where the
>monkeys get all the way to the last sentence and then
>
>One-Time-Pads offer perfect security as long as they're only used once. If
>they're used more than once, they're not one-time-pads.

This is getting silly. I made a comment about brute force search, explained
what I meant, and now some want to pick nits about semantics. My meaning
was clear. Things called "one time pads" have been broken when they were
reused. Breaking them is a matter of brute force search and checking both
decrypt streams for plaintext. If they are used correctly and not reused,
that approach isn't available. End of story.

David