[svlug] Firewalls?

[John Conover]

Rick Moen writes:
> 
> I think my favourite example is the Kriegsmarine officer, stationed in
> occupied Norway, who almost every morning got up, set his Enigma box to
> the ultra-secret settings du jour, typed in "Nichts zu berichten"
> (nothing to report), radioed the ciphertext to Berlin -- and thereby 
> handed the British and Polish cryptographers in Bletchley Park an
> instant known-plaintext "crib".
>

Yea, Enigma worked for a while. (One of the enigma messages archived
at NSA was recently decrypted-for the first time as an exercise; which
says a lot about enigma since its stuff is still reasonably secure,
half a century later-in point of fact, most of the stuff it encrypted
has never been decrypted, only a small amount-considering the
resources/money thrown at it-but enough to be worth the investment,
depending on who is telling the story.)

However, to this day, encryption is still a bit of intellectual magic.

A one way function[1] would seem to lead to a contradiction in P=NP?
meaning that any encryption methodology is vulnerable to ingenuity,
(with enough resources/money,) for the foreseeable future.

      John

[1] The existence of one-way functions (e.g., "perfect" encryption
algorithms,) is an open conjecture. Their existence implies P != NP,
which would resolve the foremost enigma of computer science. There is
nothing on the intellectual horizon that would resolve the matter.

-- 

John Conover, conover at rahul.net, http://www.johncon.com/