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On 5 Sep 2000, lcs Mixmaster Remailer wrote:

>Ray Dillinger writes:
>> In the interest of making  some news if you don't like the news 
>> you're getting, I present -- the Country Mile Cipher.  Algorithm 
>> details available (for now) on 
>>
>>         http://www.sonic.net/~bear/crypto/countrymile.html

>Your idea is to take BBS as a stream cipher, use a value based on a
>secret short key as a starting point, and then cycle it potentially a
>whole lot, millions or billions of cycles or more, before beginning to
>cipher the message with it.
<...>
>You've combined the idea of time lock crypto with an encryption function.

Bingo.

>It's not clear these two ideas go all that well together,
<,,,>
>Usually you
>either want to encrypt, in which case you want to make it easy to decrypt
>for the guy who knows the key, or you want to time-lock, in which case
>you want to control how hard it will be to find the key.  There don't
>seem to be that many cases where you want to allow decryption but only
>if you both know the key and are willing to put in a lot of time.

True. Not many.  But, I think, some.  It's a matter of using the 
right tool for the right job.  The world doesn't need yet another 
cipher, because the ciphers we have are adequately secure and 
efficient.  It doesn't need another timelock, because Rivest's 
does that job quite nicely.  But I think Country Mile fills a 
niche that I don't think I've seen anything else fill -- a keyed 
timelock.  

>Even if you did want to do that, you could just use Rivest's time lock
>to hide a key which then gets combined with your short key to produce
>the actual key to the message.

Yes, and no.  One application for Country Mile is for situations 
where you are restricted to a short key and want to get adequate 
security.  By putting a two-second delay into the decryption 
function, which is almost nonexistent in human time to someone 
who has the key, you can make a brute-force attack on the key take 
thousands of times longer -- enough to make a 56-bit key, if not 
secure, then at least adequate for a few weeks of security.

If you just used Country Mile to encrypt the key of another cipher 
system, then the effective brute force attack against that system  
could proceed without the country mile timelock slowing it down at 
all. 'Cause the system will always be attacked at its weakest link.

It's true that this is an artificial and arbitrary restriction, 
caused mainly by legal boogerheads.  But it's nice to have a tool 
in your box that can give you reasonable security anyway. 

>Along these lines your own idea could be simplified; don't encipher the
>whole message using BBS, just encipher a block-cipher key and use 3DES
>or similar to encipher the message.

Right.  That's the way RSA is usually used.  The fact doesn't 
affect the description of RSA, nor of Country Mile. Whether 
someone uses it that way is mainly a matter of what he or she 
wants to accomplish. But before deciding whether to use it that 
way, I hope he or she understands my comments about short keys 
and brute force attacks above.

>They have a similar idea but came up with an application for it in fair
>contract signing (where one party should not end up with the signature on
>a contract unless the other party does too).  For their application they
>need to be able to encrypt a message such that it can only be decrypted
>with a specified large amount of work.  However they must be able to
>reveal the encrypted message and prove that the decryption was accurate,
>using a small amount of work.  This could be done in your scheme simply
>by revealing the modulus factors (the "long key") but they want to reuse
>the modulus so they use some fancy zero knowledge proofs.

Right.  Someone from sci.crypt has pointed out that the BBS modulus, 
which gets tranmitted with the ciphertext in Country Mile, constitutes 
a handy, and potentially large, subliminal channel.  Which is another 
interesting feature, but not a viable attack on the cipher.  Revealing 
the modulus factors in Country Mile would only de-timelock the one 
message encrypted under that modulus -- a fact which might turn out 
to be an important and desirable property in some protocols.  Since 
new factors are chosen with each encryption, it doesn't suffer from 
the usual problem with stream ciphers, where you can't use the same 
key more than once. In fact you can go on using the same short key, 
with a different modulus, even after you "de-timelock" a message by 
revealing the modulus factors.  

Thanks for looking at it! 

				Ray