live-cd distro that writes to cd

John Macdonald john-Z7w/En0MP3xWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org
Wed Mar 9 17:29:36 UTC 2005


On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:51:50AM -0500, William Park wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 09:54:02AM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
> > On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, William Park wrote:
> > >     - secured data transfer -- no need for encryption.  Possible
> > >     application might be hospitals, where in-house local transfer is
> > >     needed but without wireless or cable.
> > 
> > But now you've added the possibility of loss or theft of physical
> > media.  (As witness occasional news stories, in a big organization,
> > tracking and inventory control of removable media containing sensitive
> > information is a big problem.  USB keys make it worse, by being so
> > small.)  In fact, you *want* such data encrypted when it's stored on
> > such a device.
> 
> 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?

When you refer to a decryption key that is different from the
encryption key, you're talking about a public key encryption
method.  The government knew about public key encryption for
years without making it public.  They did not manage to prevent
it from becoming public knowledge when it was independently
discovered by researchers who were not controlled by the NSA.

For a USB key app+data, you're more likely to be using a
private key mechanism (which uses the same key for encryption
as for decryption).

Anyhow, you may not care whether there may be some people in
the NSA who know how to decode your data.  It can be extremely
important to protect company secrets from competitors, while
not being a significant concern one way or the other whether
some government spies might be able to crack those secrets.

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