Every so often (Barnum said once a minute but I think he was giving people too much credit) some moron re-invents the one-time-pad and thinks they have hit on the ultimate security system. Read the following and see if you can Spot the Moron:
Dr. Rabin relies instead on the limits of memory banks in computers. No
matter how powerful a computer is, no computer can store an unlimited
amount of data. And yet that is what is required for an eavesdropper to
break his code.
The coding starts with a continuously generated string of random
numbers, say from a satellite put up to broadcast them or from some
other source. The numbers can be coming by at an enormous speed —
10 million million per second, for example.
The sender of a message and its recipient agree to start plucking a
sequence of numbers from that string. They may agree, for example, to
send a message, encoded with any of today's publicly available
encryption systems saying "start" and giving instructions on capturing
certain of the random numbers. As they capture the numbers, the sender
uses them to encode a message, and the recipient uses the numbers to
decode it.
OK, here we go... Gaping hole. How do they communicate the "ready... set... start!" parameters securely? This system doesn't offer any security at all. What it offers is that the data isn't readable
after a while... which isn't shit. One time pads already offered that security. The "one time" parts imply that after using the pad of random data to encrypt, you THROW IT AWAY. Any eavesdropper gets both the start time and the encrypted data, they get the prize. Whoops.
Hole two, it requires a non-infected pure random source that is public. Worse unless the stream is proveably random, you ain't got shit. Some bastard will hack your random that ain't so random and get enough data to hurt you. You think I'm kidding? Some bugger did it years ago with Netscape's
HTTPS webserver, figured out their random number wasn't so random and got enough bits to
hack the stream almost real-time.
Hole three, it assumes that some asshole won't FIND away to store all that fucking random data.
Have any of you been paying attention to the computer industry? 15 years ago we
used the unpolished back sides of 5.25 floppies to get an extra 180KB of storage without dropping 10 bucks on a new disk. Now you can get on Price Watch and find plenty of vendors who will sell you 80GB of hard drive for $240. Folks, that is 466,034 times the space for 24 times the money. I regularly work with files 100 times the size of that floppy's storage.
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