GPG's vulnerability to brute force

Peter Lebbing peter at digitalbrains.com
Sat May 17 10:51:40 CEST 2014


On 17/05/14 01:12, Leo Gaspard wrote:
> Well... If the operation the bit just underwent was a bitflip (and, knowing the
> bruteforcing circuit, it's possible to know that), the bit was a '0'.

I admit this is beyond my knowledge, but maybe the following is rather
intuitive and not too incorrect.

"Flipping one bit" is not enough. You don't make any progress toward a
solution if you only keep flipping the same bit. At the least, you need
to decide to flip which bit. That is also information, information that
is not stored in the resultant bit array where you flipped one bit.

More in general, I agree with Rob that this is not a physics course, and
this is just a thought I had and wanted to share.

You can't object to scientific theories on the basis that you did not
study them properly. It might have a bit of a Socratic feel to it, but
it quite falls short of the real thing.

Physics and computation at this level are pretty unintuitive, I think.
Maybe my little attempt to introduce some intuition about information
content is grossly wrong, and maybe it's a folly to attempt intuition at
all.

HTH,

Peter.

-- 
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You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
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