[dave at farber.net: [IP] more on AP Story Justice Dept. Probing Domestic Spyin

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sun, 1 Jan 2006, Tyler Durden wrote:

A couple of points trouble me here, to wit:

(1) We are describing encryptedmessage sent over the public internet -
granted, it's in "pieces", yet it's still sent into the public cloud;

(2) These various pieces are all "record" communications as far as
NSA/Echelon is concerned, and therefore we should expect that they will
draw significant attention - and end up in permanent archives;

(3) Since all off the pieces have been stored - including both the
encrypted messagetexts and the decryptors, what is to prevent a
time-faking attack against this message?  After all, if you have all the
parts, you can just "reinstantiate" the network as it was was the messages
were originally sent.

(4) For any form of time-destruction messaging to really work, the keying
information would have to be tied to a physical <something> that cannot be
reclaimed, and which decays at a fixed, known, and closely approximatable
rate (a radiodecay probably doesn't meet this criteria);

Every time-sensitive auto-destructing system Ive seen discussed here fails
these weaknesses.

-- 
Yours,

J.A. Terranson
sysadmin at mfn.org
0xBD4A95BF


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