I have recently started to think that I need some sort of encrption, for various different reasons, but nothing scary etc.

So I would like some advice on which to use.

Safety against ALL attacks is not really an issue. I have nothing to hide from my govenment of the NSA, so would be happy to use single DES if that was the best program for me.

My requirements are these.
1)Ease of use.
2)Must be able to encrypt various different file formats: Excel, Word, HTML, various different chemical modeling packages.
3)Must be relatively quick.
4) No need for public key, as will not be sending data, simple storing it on discs.
5) Don't want AES or dirrivatives. ( SP?) have been reading that these are coming close to being cracked on Sci.Crypt.

Ta for any advice.
RipSlider

quote:

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Originally posted by RipSlider:
2)Must be able to encrypt various different file formats: Excel, Word, HTML, various different chemical modeling packages.

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huh?

Errh, why not ZIP?

FreePGP.

and zipfiles are no protection whatsoever..

blowfish for dos is good. its not the easiest to use but i dont think it has been cracked yet and its very fast. you dont want a graphical front end with encryption anyway. you can always just write a batch file script to automate most of the commands for you and simply prompt you for the file name.

Im with Jaded....

FreePGP uses a suite of rather decent encryption algorithms and they are easy to use.

FreePGP is very easy to use, like as easy as Winzip and apparently it's some very heavy duty encryption, the type of thing that makes the NSA crap in it's pants in fear. It's a public key system and it can encrypte most file formats.

has anyone else used blowfish?

hehe, public encryption algorithms making the NSA shit their pants? I personally dont believe that. Personally, I think the NSA has enough computing power to crack pretty anything out there in a prompt fashion.

The question here is why would they even bother? and im thinking most of the time, they wont.

The US government (including the NSA) DO NOT advertise when they crack certain encryption. They had DES cracked almost since the year it was released.... and that was 20+ years ago.

Encryption rocks when you are protecting data against the common hacker or even the uberhacker, but the NSA could fuck your encryption in the ass before they ever shit their pants.

Again, this is just my bullshit, ranting and over-paranioa

--
cEnsE
evil, corruption and bad taste

no its true. their systems can crack DES in a matter of seconds if they decide to use the best equipment. right now corperations have mainframes that can do over 700ghz easy, just imagine what the NSA has. dont fool yourself for one second, your encryption is useless against big brother.

if you use nothing but mathematical cryption, yes.

the best encryption is only a tool to delay the discovery of information.

I don't doubt that the NSA has access to computers in the terahertz rage nut with the number of messages it has to decode, it wouldn't have the time to bother with my correspondance.

And anyways, PGP is, as it name implies, pretty good. The security behind the program is explaned in depth here, which, by the jist of it, would mean that even if the NSA was able to break the PGP code, it would take a number of days. And if you were smart enough to change password regularly and use code words, it wouldn't be a problem.

sike, it would take the average agent a few days on an average workstation. if they wanted to crack it quickly then they would authorize the use of a super computer. at that point you would have minets. as you said tho its "pretty good protection" and the eaverage person is not worth the use of super computers.

i said it once and ill say it again- nothing is uncrackable or unhackable, you just have to make it more trouble than its worth.

wrong again, by mathematical reasons. There are to many possibilities, so a crypted cookbook for potatoes could be a receipt for ecstacy ...

BSK,

That does not mean its uncrackable, i dont get your logic that its uncrackable. If you were to look at the potatoe receipe and knew that it was a code for something else but you had no idea what, you could figure it out with enough resources, same as any encryption. Someone has to know what the code is and how to reverse engineer it to get the results/contents.

The point you are trying to argue is that non-mathematical code cant be cracked.... thats untrue. Language can be understood if studied enough and thats all that non-math code is, a language.

Of course, i could be overlooking some critical point that you have made or are implying.

--
cEnsE

quote:

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Originally posted by cense:
knew that it was a code for something

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that�s the point. That�s what makes it easy to encode ZIP files, but only if you know the content. (BTW, for those who refere to my first post in this thread, I just wanted to say that decompressing with a codeword should be enough. If a specialist gets his hands on the discs and on the comp, no prog could help him out.)

What I tried to point out was that you can have all ressources of the world, you don�t know which one of the possible translations is the right one. With a special language code added, there wouldn�t even be a suspicious translation ...

I said "if you use nothing but mathematical cryption, yes.", that doesn�t mean that only non-mathematical code should be used. But a mixture of both makes it.

i think your missing the point. your suggesting inventing your own cipher so that they attacker wouldnt have a place to start cracking but its flawed. in theory you could have a program randomly generate ciphers and use them to crack an entire database ubtill a cipher works and the file is succesfully cracked. this would obviosly take a great deal of time but would not be impossible. and how would you hide a cipher? the meduim it was developed and implememnted on would have to be burnt or melted. smashing discs doesnt stop the authorities anymore

posted 06-03-2002 16:44 by BSK

posted 06-03-2002 16:51 by syphon detonator


next time you�ll think about it a little bit more, ok?

When I say "If a specialist gets his hands on the discs and on the comp, no prog could help him out.", I really don�t want to be told that "smashing discs doesnt stop the authorities anymore", by telling me that I miss the point.

i dont see what the time i posted has to do with the fact that your wrong. why are you being so anal retentive? big deal you had one thing wrong, deal with it. and what is your response to cipher cracking? clearly you are wrong about his but for some reason your being very combative. there is no shame in not knowing

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
... why are you being so anal retentive? ... clearly you are wrong about his but for some reason your being very combative.

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it�s not me who�s turning this into a flame war.

quote:

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there is no shame in not knowing

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what do you know? Show me. Show me where I�m wrong. I�m in this business now for 14 years, btw.

[This message has been edited by BSK (edited 06-04-2002).]

Ive been in this business for *just* long enough to know that its not how long you've been in the business that matters... neither is the number of posts your have.

but you are right BSK , this is a flame war and for pretty pointless reasons. I'll try not to add to it, but I will jump in and correct you guys when you are wrong.

I still want to know how you plan on hiding data in a reciepe and have no one know its a code but still produce the final results later... I dont under, do explain BSK.

--
cEnsE

Question, if civil authorities (ei. FBI, RCMP, etc.) were to find things encrypted by PGP, would they be able to crack it? And if not, would they send it along to intelligence agencies like the NSA?

yes please do explain this to me. if you make your own cipher you need it on the device used for encryption and decryption. how are you going to encrypt something without a cipher?

thats easy to answer syphon..
2 words ..."Magic Wond"

quote:

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Originally posted by BSK:
There are to many possibilities, so a crypted cookbook for potatoes could be a receipt for ecstacy ...

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somehow I got the feeling you two misunderstood this sentence. I didn�t say that a cookbook for ecstacy would be encrypted as a potatoe cookbook. What I wanted to point out was that the harder the crypt level is, the more possible translations come out. So a simple potatoe cookbook could become a cookbook for ecstacy, a kidnapper�s letter or a message to agent firefly to assassinate the traitor agent cocksport. So which one would be the right translation? Only if you knew something of the content, you would be able to figure out which one of the possible translations would be the right one. How do you do this? You�re searching for keywords. But if these keywords aren�t used, the chance to detect the right translation decreases very fast.

I agree with all this... but you have to see that all you are doing is hiding data so that later, *YOU* can find it. A simple masking of the data in a way that only you know. If no one knows that the potatoe receipe is a code for something then how it is useful for transmitting data? The other ends wants the data, not a potatoe receipe.

You dont send out encrypted messages on the net so that you can read them later yourself.

I do agree with your point but its not on the same topic as this whole encryption argument got started out. Your ideas are valid, but not in this context.

tell me to shutup where you think i went wrong.

--
cEnsE

quote:

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Originally posted by BSK:
somehow I got the feeling you two misunderstood this sentence. I didn�t say that a cookbook for ecstacy would be encrypted as a potatoe cookbook. What I wanted to point out was that the harder the crypt level is, the more possible translations come out. So a simple potatoe cookbook could become a cookbook for ecstacy, a kidnapper�s letter or a message to agent firefly to assassinate the traitor agent cocksport. So which one would be the right translation? Only if you knew something of the content, you would be able to figure out which one of the possible translations would be the right one. How do you do this? You�re searching for keywords. But if these keywords aren�t used, the chance to detect the right translation decreases very fast.

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ahh i see what you mean. your reffering to the way that when you crack a given peice of encrypted material then the cracked passward or whatever your trying to get is only so accurate. this is common in DES when you crack DES passwords then you are about 95% sure that the password the cracker spit out is correct. you are suggesting that you shuld make the hash so complicated that when cracked there are so many possiblities that there would only be something like a 25% chance that the password and ultimatly the decrypted data is correct.

this would be a good concept but if they key matches up to the orginal file being craked once the hash is applied then you use this key or password to decrypt the data its no good. the data comes out as a recipe for potatoes or as garbage.

right key: cut up four potatoes
wrong key: safdjjlk jjf4j54 5ja9 fjafds9

it wouldnt come out as a cooking instruction and bomb building instructions and the karma sutra. it would come out as potatoes or as garbage.

also the implementation of this concept is unrealistic. for a hash to be so powerfull that there are hundreds of possible correct password it would have to have a extreemly long bit length and be very complex. to decrypt this sort of hash would take a great deal of processor power and would be impratical for the average user to take atvantage of without specialized equiptment that is prohibitivly expensive right now.



[This message has been edited by syphon detonator (edited 06-05-2002).]

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
the best encryption is only a tool to delay the discovery of information.

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I think the best point made up to now was made by syphon (shown Above) Encryption is no more but a tool to delay the release of information. Say for instance the CIA has a classified mission encrypted with their highest encryption algorithm and stored on one of their servers, which is then recovered by Russian hackers working for their government, That encryption is only useful to the CIA if the cracking time exceeds the usefulness of the information contained within the ciphered data.

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
your encryption is useless against big brother.

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quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
i said it once and ill say it again- nothing is uncrackable or unhackable, you just have to make it more trouble than its worth.

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I would agree with that, with enough time, money, well-educated people, and extremely high-powered machines the likeliness in my eyes is that most if not all of a ciphered file can be recovered to a high degree of accuracy. But the point BSK was making to me also seems valid enough:

quote:

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Originally posted by BSK:
wrong again, by mathematical reasons. There are to many possibilities, so a crypted cookbook for potatoes could be a receipt for ecstacy ...

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I agree with this based on the assumption that the cracker has no knowledge of the content of the original file, which you have already said:

quote:

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Originally posted by BSK:
What I tried to point out was that you can have all ressources of the world, you don�t know which one of the possible translations is the right one. With a special language code added, there wouldn�t even be a suspicious translation ...

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quote:

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Originally posted by BSK:
Only if you knew something of the content, you would be able to figure out which one of the possible translations would be the right one.

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I do however believe that a most likely, decrypted file could be recovered but as you said it could all be incorrect rubbish in comparison to the original file. If absolutely nothing is known about the original unencrypted file it would be significantly harder to decrypt it, however it could be decrypted. I guess it all falls back then to what I said at the beginning of this post.

I think you are all right Syphon, Cense and BSK in your individual points you seem to only disagree where those points overlap each other, and that seems to be the reliability of any recovered data.

That�s just my opinion anyway No More No Less.

VIPER


[This message has been edited by Viper2002 (edited 06-05-2002).]

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
for a hash to be so powerfull that there are hundreds of possible correct password it would have to have a extreemly long bit length and be very complex

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this is exactly why I�m telling you to use more than just mathematical algorithms for cryptography. Gives you very easy as many possibilities as there are waterdrops in our oceans.

And cense, shutup
It�s the same topic as it started originally (storing data), maybe not the same we started

Their is only one way to encrypt information that's uncrackable or unhackable, the one-time pad encryption. That's where you both have a private list of keywords so that each message you transmit uses a different keyword.

redrover i dont know a lot about timepad encryption but whats to say the key word cant be obtained since two people are involved? people are not to be trusted and social engeneering combined with serious threats would make quick work of most people

just to make an example:

Let�s take the title of this thread and use a code we call 6-4-2.
Advice on Encryption programs.

at first we replace the vowels with numbers from 1 to 6, the e is presented by 2 numbers, because it is the first letter someone counts to get knowledge of the code:
a=5
e=3/6
i=1
o=2
u=4

and we get:
5dv1c3 2n 6ncrypt12n pr2gr5ms

after that we make character groups from 1 to 4:
5dv1c32n6ncrypt12npr2gr5ms
5 dv 1c3 2n6n c ry pt1 2npr 2 gr 5ms

and exchange all groups with 2 or 4 characters with the following group:
5 ry 1c3 2npr c dv pt1 2n6n 2 gr 5ms

after that we fill the code with random characters from 1 to 2 characters after every group:
5� ry?l 1c3# 2nprw1 cf dvgw pt1x 2n6nd3 2r gr47 5mso

after this is done, we use the real crypt program.

Another step is to translate it into binary and change the last 4 bits of every byte with the first 4 bits of the following byte or even more complicated. Now guess how it would be like if the word Encycption is replaced by the word spaghetti and the word program by beer ...