Who needs time vaults anyway?
Daniel R. Oelke
droelke at spirit.aud.alcatel.com
Sat Nov 11 14:02:28 PST 1995
>
> As for real time-release - how about just using conventional encryption,
> and require it to be brute-forced?
>
> Depending on how fine grained you want the release to be, you could also
> take the inverse of Moore's law, work out how big a key you need to have
> it unbreakable in less than the desired time, add in whatever fudge
> factors you feel like based on how much it would be worth to the opponent
> to get early access, then lock up the secret and throw away the key.
>
The problem here is that it is probablistic when they are
going to be able to unlock it. If the search space will take a
total of 10 years to exhaustively search, there is a 50% chance
that they will find the key within 5 years, 10% chance that it
will be found in 1 year, etc. So, if you are lucky, it will
be found in about the time you want it to be. If you aren't it
will be found in a few milli-seconds.
There is also the problem that your intended recipeient will
need to expend just as much work as your advesary to decrypt
the message. This might not be a disadvantage in the case of
a "broadcast" message, but otherwise it might be.
Good idea - but I would say not pratical....
Now, if we just had an objects between 1 and 10 light years away
that you could bounce lasers off of...... ;-)
Dan
------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Oelke Alcatel Network Systems
droelke at aud.alcatel.com Richardson, TX
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list