4 ms·
I don't get it. If it's not secure why can't the message be revealed? What's the value of breaking someone's crypto if you are still unable to see the data unen
by genwin 13y ago
I don't get it. If it's not secure why can't the message be revealed? What's the value of breaking someone's crypto if you are still unable to see the data unencrypted? Was the recipe for decryption given, with the actual decryption being much harder (terms so narrow, as you say)?
- alanh 13y agogenwin, I’ve invented a secure system. If you can tell me what this message says, you win $200k: jo You don’t know what the message says, because it’s so short. You will never win the prize. But my system was not so secure. My cipher system was this: Take a message and type it on a US Qwerty keyboard, but shift every letter over one place. So `hi` became `jo`. Not very strong. It would easily be cracked with a message consisting of an actual sentence or two. Now, with Telegraph, it wasn’t just length of the message involved, but additional information; still, the conditions are so narrow that it doesn’t apply to the real world. Just like I’d never simply send you a message that said "hi", Telegraph would be used in ways beyond one simple back-and-forth exchange, so it artificially limits the information available to a cracker. Make sense? See also: The BEAST attack or the general class of side channel attacks.
- na85 13y agoIf you search back a few days of HN posts there was an explanation posted.
- rpedroso 13y agoMoxie's blog post does a better job explaining the problems than I can [1]. Basically, the framework of the contest precludes many avenues of attack to which a given cryptosystem could be vulnerable. The researcher who discovered the vulnerability in the OP used a man-in-the-middle attack, which cannot be used in the Telegram contest.