Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘Every message was copied to the police’

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 193 posts

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#161

Post by grungydan »

28619242 wrote: post #68

The sad thing about this technology is that it's routinely used, as enumerated in this article, to a completely worthless end. Cocaine should not be illegal anywhere, nor should surveillance stings be set up to entrap people.

That's exactly where my mind went as I read the article.

All of this money and effort just to continue to prosecute a meaningless and harmful "drug war."

At this point, countries are literally spending money to prevent themselves from making money (by setting up legal markets and tax structures).

It's all so absolutely and miserably asinine.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#162

Post by rtkwe »

generalizations wrote: post #158
nybble41 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process… …you're not using a one-time pad. OTP requires the pad to be truly random: at least one bit of unique, never-used-elsewhere entropy for every bit in the message. Merely XORing some plaintext with a pseudo-random stream based on a smaller seed, which as you say is the basis for various other encryption algorithms, is no…

Which is why it seems like there should at least be an RFC for OTP communication - if there's a small group that wants to communicate securely together, it may be worth their time and effort to share that pad securely. Right now, there's no official standard for that.

It's not a complex system, you share the noise and XOR your plaintext with it before sending.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#163

Post by rtkwe »

nybble41 wrote: post #126
rtkwe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process a lot of encryption algorithms are various ways of creating a one-time pad. And they save a lot on space which used to be precious. With a single key much smaller than a megabyte I can encrypt essentially endlessly where for the normal OTP process I need as much random data as there is data to be encrypted which gets unwi…

> Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process… …you're not using a one-time pad. OTP requires the pad to be truly random: at least one bit of unique, never-used-elsewhere entropy for every bit in the message. Merely XORing some plaintext with a pseudo-random stream based on a smaller seed, which as you say is the basis for various other encryption algorithms, is no…

That's what I was saying a true OTP is a cumbersome version of stream cyphers that trades some improvement in security for a huge increase in fragility and difficulty of use and distribution.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#164

Post by mindslight »

generalizations wrote: post #31
Buttons840 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Encrypt your message with your home grown encryption, then send it through standard TLS. Both would have to fail for the message to be revealed. Sometimes when I'm wearing my tinfoil hat I wonder if the advice to avoid rolling your own crypto is a conspiracy. The powers that be want to maintain their backdoors, maybe? Probably not. Of course, it's definitely true that there are more attack vectors out t…

I also wonder why there's such a pushback against one-time-pads. The common critiques don't seem to be any greater of a risk than the holes we've already encountered (e.g. heartbleed). I think I remember a scifi story that mentioned some character who worked in the one-time-pad shipping business. I guess a spacecraft full of data storage can hold enough random data to last for a long time. Seems like we should at lea…

One time pads punt on the real problems of key distribution and framing (eg a stream cipher uses a "one time pad" as a building block) and also don't provide all of the qualities we expect from modern cryptographic systems (eg message integrity).

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#165

Post by Threeve303 »

Most states have their own mini secret police now. These Bureau of "Intelligence" agencies do not have much oversight. Often to the agents and leadership, their cultural and political views are more important than the law itself.

I don't think we need to defund the police but they need more oversight based on certain experiences and things I've read about over the years.

The same thing happened when the Soviet Union was going through its slow collapse. KGB type agencies became more and more powerful and the average citizens suffered as a result. Many of their methods have now made it here with things like psychological torture and using the mental health system to practice punitive psychiatry.

One silver lining to having a stasi-esque surveillance state is that it watches everyone, even the crooked cops involved in a conspiracy. Unfortunately, the public in the U.S. seems to be fully onboard as we continue our descent into a fascist state.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#166

Post by hda2 »

giantg2 wrote: post #84
literallyaduck wrote: post #74

Now invoke consumer protections acts against both agencies for fraudulent advertising, and wiretapping the 93% of communication not related to criminal activities.

If they used a user agreement similar to most in the industry (we make the rules and can change them at any time without notice), then it's probably all legal. Sadly.

if this is true, then laws and rights don't matter anymore.

Re: ‘Every message was copied to the police’

#169

Post by generalizations »

rtkwe wrote: post #163
nybble41 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you’re using a true random number generator that works on a mechanical/electrical process… …you're not using a one-time pad. OTP requires the pad to be truly random: at least one bit of unique, never-used-elsewhere entropy for every bit in the message. Merely XORing some plaintext with a pseudo-random stream based on a smaller seed, which as you say is the basis for various other encryption algorithms, is no…

That's what I was saying a true OTP is a cumbersome version of stream cyphers that trades some improvement in security for a huge increase in fragility and difficulty of use and distribution.

> With a single key much smaller than a megabyte

Unless that was a preshared key, you're not talking about a one time pad. One time pads are inherently symmetric. If you're comparing symmetric to assymmetric crypto systems, you might as well just say that 'if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle'.

Post reply on HN