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Old 12-28-2016, 06:09 AM  
rowan
Too lazy to set a custom title
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Australia
Posts: 17,393
Quote:
Originally Posted by notinmybackyard View Post
When they manage to crack a "One-Time-Pad" encryption then they might be useful.

One-Time-Pad encryption was invented in 1882 and no one has ever been able to crack it. I absolutely guarantee that anyone wanting to keep something truly secret is using this encryption.
It's still possible to crack this if the source of "randomness" is weak or buggy.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/.../CVE-2008-0166

Due to a coding bug, the random number generator was seeded with only 15 bits of data, which means that only 32767 unique streams would be output by the random number generator. If a key is generated immediately after seeding, that means there's only 32767 possible keys, which makes brute forcing easy. Normally a random number generator suitable for cryptography would use many, many more bits as a seed.

So if the random number generator for your OTP is flawed, it may be possible to crack the message.
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