live-cd distro that writes to cd

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:51:50AM -0500, William Park wrote:
> I don't buy into encryption hype, really.  Probably because I didn't go
> through Computer Science.  But, my feeling is that you get decryption
> key by adding 42 to the encryption key.  Why else would government allow
> such algorithm to be public?

Go look up have plain simple RSA works.  The mathematics are really
quite simple, and hence using current known techniques is extremely hard
to crack, while very easy to implement for use.  Essentially the cpu
work required to do the calculations for encryption and decryption are
not very high, while the amount of brute force calculations needed to
break the key are enourmous, since in the case of rsa you have to factor
a number into its two prime factors (well they should be primes,
although in practice pseudo primes are used since finding large primes is
actually quite hard).  A pseudo prime is a number that is likely a prime
based on some reasonably quick checks, so it is not obviously not a
prime, and they are much faster to generate than a real prime number.

The people who come up with these algorithms in many cases don't seem to
care one bit what the government thinks of it, they just like to make
perfect little algorithms for encryption.  After all you then get to
name the nifty algorithm by sticking your initials in it's name. :)
Making an algorithm with back doors that is still actually secure
(assuming the backdoor can actually be kept perfectly secure (yeah
right)), would seem to be a lot harder than making an algorithm that is
simply secure with no backdoors.

A university clasical algebra course should teach how these basic
encryption algorithms work.

Lennart Sorensen
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