Where could I ask a general question about encryption not specific to gpg?

[J. Scott Edwards]

Doh!  It occurred to me this morning that it is weak because it is
generated from a 64 bit key.  So anyone with a petaflop machine
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39431427,00.htm would be
able to crack it in short order.  Sorry for missing the obvious and
the off topic post.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 8:12 AM, I <j.scott.edwards.nwos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was wondering if there was someplace I could ask a question about
> encryption not specific to gpg?
>
> I have a project I have been working on for several years (it is
> nowhere near complete).  A few days ago I accidentally ran across this
> page on SourceForge:
> http://alexandria.wiki.sourceforge.net/Notes+on+the+Hosting+of+Cryptographic+Software+at+SourceForge.net
> and I was not even sure if my project fell into that category.  (I was
> not developing the project specifically to encrypt data, it was just
> that I wanted the data it was storing to be encrypted.)
>
> So I contacted the Software Freedom Law Center
> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ to see if they could advise me.  I
> talked to them and they said the government would not be concerned
> with my project at this time because it just uses "weak encryption" on
> top of "strong encryption" and the strong encryption comes from a
> library and is not part of my project.  That is cool, I was quite
> relieved.
>
> But then I started wondering about the "weak encryption" part.  What I
> do is after it gets encrypted with the normal library encryption, I
> reorder the bytes.  (The attorney said this was the "weak
> encryption".)  So I started wondering if it is worth doing this at all
> (it was fairly easy to do)?  My theory was that since there are 248
> bytes that the possibilities would be 248! which I spent a little time
> trying to calculate but all of the things I tried overflowed
> eventually and I didn't want to take the time to write a program to
> calculate the whole number.  Since the numbers I got were pretty big
> and I was a long way from 248, I assumed that it was pretty large.
>
> Anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't want to this to get this long.  I was just
> wondering if anyone could point me to somewhere or someone that could
> explain why reordering would be weak and if it is worth doing at all.
>
> Thanks
>  -Scott
>