[Cialug] Immersion

[Morris Dovey]

On 7/8/13 9:21 PM, Nicolai wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 08, 2013 at 08:02:08PM -0500, Morris Dovey wrote:
>> No time to rant - been too busy writing combination compression and
>> n-bit (for any n > 32) encryption software. The paranoics will be able
>> to go to 8192-bit (or higher, depending on level of paranoia)
>> encryption. :-)
>
> Crypto is fun :)
>
> While on the subject, as crypto library I like NaCl.  It's high level,
> C/C++.  There are wrappers for Python, Ruby, and maybe other langs.
>
>    http://nacl.cr.yp.to
>    http://cr.yp.to/highspeed/coolnacl-20120725.pdf

Nicolai, thank you for the links - I’ve downloaded the PDF and 
bookmarked the NaCl Intro page. :-)

Compression alone isn’t encryption, but compression can contribute to 
the difficulty of breaking if it helps to disguise the point at which a 
decryption stage is complete. At some point the cracker has to decide to 
stop decrypting and start decompressing.

The code continued growing after I posted my test program snapshots, and 
(today) includes four compression methods and three encryption methods. 
It turned out to be convenient (and productive) to interleave 
compression and encryption stages to force crackers to expend an 
absolute maximum of effort/cycles.

Most people don’t realize that encryption is not so much about 
preventing access to data - as it is about /scheduling/ that access and 
increasing its cost beyond any reasonable threshold.

Ironically, the motivation behind this effort is to provide data 
security for open source development (primarily alternative energy) 
collaborators from “opportunivores”. :-)