Cryptography of a sort - redux

Mike McNally m5 at tivoli.com
Mon Sep 16 10:04:10 PDT 1996


Dale Thorn wrote:
> 
> The only way to recover the original text is to reposition the
> shuffled bits correctly, which requires brute-force guessing of the
> pseudo-random-number output. 

Even if I know the PRNG algorithm?  And just what is it that you
propose to use for the PRNG?

> This guess is very simple for the first encoding layer, but
> compounds exponentially in subsequent encodings

Exponentially?  Could you provide the math to explain how your
composition of PRNG's gives this exponential increase in 
difficulty?

> , so
> that after half a dozen or a dozen passes, where the executable
> program(s) is called from scratch for each pass, the shuffling rapidly
> approaches true randomness, and cannot be decrypted in practice except
> through the exact mirror-image reversal of the encryption passes.

So what do the encryption keys look like?  And what's this "true
randomness" stuff?


______c_________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX * For the time being,
       m5 at tivoli.com * m101 at io.com       *    
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>      * three heads and eight arms.






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