[10522] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: theory: unconditional security
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lucky Green)
Wed Feb 27 13:01:59 2002
Message-ID: <01e301c1bf6b$cdb96610$b83a080a@LUCKYVAIO>
From: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
To: <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 00:50:27 -0800
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Carl wrote:
> I suspect you find little written about OTP work because people have
> always assumed the keys were impractical to distribute, store and
> use.
While distribution of OTP's has become feasible amongst tightly-knit groups
of non-governmental actors, the rate at which OTP's can be generated has
fallen behind the rate at which data needs to be communicated between the
nodes. To give an example, creating OTP's to encrypt messages along the
lines of "the attack will take place at dawn on Thursday" was easy with WWII
technology and is even easier now. However, the sheer volume of data
transmitted between even small nodes today requires vastly larger OTP's than
was required for military or diplomatic communications in the past.
I am not aware of any RNG design in the open literature that would even come
close to generating the sheer volume of random numbers required by current
civilian communication patterns. I trust that I don't need to elucidate on
this list as to why a "solution" that would require the sender to limit the
use of OTPs to sending critical data while other data would be encrypted
using a different system will invariably lead to COMSEC failures.
--Lucky
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