5 ms·
genwin, 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 sh
by alanh 13y ago
genwin, 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.