On 8/24/25 7:07 AM, Michael wrote: >> Is so ridiculous that with your theory ANYONE could obtain any private >> key just with a public key because you can write text plain, encrypt it >> with and compare both. Please stop doing that kind of affirmations. > > All encryption methods and ciphers are secure, until ... they no longer are. > > >> Your theory is only valid for a few old (really old) encryptions >> algorythms and usually symmetric. > > Sure, this stands today, but tomorrow new mathematical solutions could be > discovered, better computational technologies developed, larger data storage, > etc. No doubt resistant algos and ciphers would be devised in turn to > counteract it thereafter, but what's broken is broken. > > If I were a dissident under totalitarian rule and my family's life depended > on > it, I would consciously choose to be needlessly paranoid rather than take a > chance. Living in a free society and for communicating casually with > friends, > I'd trust the math. YMMV.
If I were a dissident under totalitarian rule and my family's life depended on it, I would stake my and their life on the belief that new attacks against cryptography use entirely new attack methodologies and defending against the attacks originally used to break the Caesar Cipher is a waste of time. I'd focus rather more on ensuring messages which I send, use algorithms known to be secure today, and avoid sending incriminating information unless it has a "limited shelf life" -- i.e. if the government records the message and in 20 years gets the ability to decrypt it, it cannot cause harm anymore. As part of that, don't send more information than is necessary. If you're leaving email quotes in your replies, that may include something the other person shouldn't have said but let slip, and keeping it in *every* message means many more chances for the totalitarian government to record the message for 20 years in the future when they break it. That is a **much** better reason to avoid quoting existing emails than "known quoted content could be used to attack the algorithm, I heard it was successfully used to attack the Caesar Cipher". Related: forward secrecy protects against future compromise of the secret key (but not compromise of the crypto algorithm itself). -- Eli Schwartz
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