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Post #161987

Author
Scruffy
Parent topic
ROTS Satellite Feed
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/161987/action/topic#161987
Date created
8-Dec-2005, 11:33 PM
Well, the whole point of encryption is that the intended recipient is able to decrypt it. Otherwise you're destroying the original, and that's called destruction, not encryption.

If he meant, "There is no encryption that is not vulnerable to cryptanalytic attack," that's not true, either. A properly-implemented one-time pad system is invulnerable to attack; that is, the ciphertext is indistinguishable from random data and no amount of poking or prodding will make it make sense.

It's unlikely[1], though, that Lucasfilm used a OTP to encrypt its movies. It's more likely they used some standard block based cipher. There are attacks against those, but it is not feasible to brute force them unless they are really, really, truly broken. The best way to break a crypo system is still just finding the key+ciphertext or finding the plaintext. Either one requires some unscrupulous exhibitor to smuggle 80 GiB to a bootlegger. (Probably has already happened, but it's not trivial.)

[1] But not impossible -- some banks in Europe are using OTPs to communicate with their customers over the Internet.