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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] Password questions, looking for opinions. cryptsetup question too.
From:       Dale <rdalek1967 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2023-09-23 13:35:19
Message-ID: a22521e4-b504-2d92-2e1d-1b77063f081f () gmail ! com
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Wols Lists wrote:
> On 20/09/2023 19:05, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>>> In principle, a repeated space character in your passphrase could help
>>> reduce the computational burden of an offline brute force attack, by
>>> e.g.
>>> helping an attacker to identify the number of individual words in a
>>> passphrase.
>
>> Due to the rotation, the Enigma encoded each subsequent letter
>> differently,
>> even if the same one repeated, which was (one of) the big strengths
>> of the
>> Enigma cipher. The flaws were elsewhere, for example that a character
>> could
>> never be encrypted onto itself due to the internal wiring and certain
>> message parts were always the same, like message headers and greetings.
>
> And, as always, one of the biggest weaknesses was the operator.
>
> Enigma had three (or in later versions four) rotors. The code book
> specified the INITIAL "settings of the day" for those rotors. What was
> *supposed* to happen was the operator was supposed to select a random
> three/four character string, transmit that string twice, then reset
> the rotors to that string before carrying on. So literally no two
> messages were supposed to have the same settings beyond the first six
> characters.
>
> Except that a lot of operators re-used the same characters time and
> time again. So if you got a message from an operator you recognised,
> you might well know his "seventh character reset". That saved a lot of
> grief trying to crack which of the several rotors were "the rotors of
> the day".
>
> And given that, for a large chunk of the war, the radio operators were
> "chatty", you generally got a lot of six-character strings for which
> you had a damn good idea what the plain text was.
>
> So even where some of the operators were seriously crypto-aware and
> careful, once you'd cracked the rotors and initial settings from the
> careless, you could read every message sent by everyone (using those
> settings) that day.
>
> Along with other things like RDF giving subs positions away (although
> I'm not quite sure how much we had good RDF and how much it was a
> cover for us reading their location in status reports), it certainly
> helped us loads hunting them down.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
>
>

Another question.  Are people trying to work on better encryption given
current encryption can be cracked?  I read some things changed after
Snowden.  I'm just not sure what and if more changes are needed even
today. 

If you wanted the most secure and hard to crack encryption, what would
you use?  How does one tell cryptsetup to use it?  I have several
encryption options here but no idea what is the best or even just good. 

I'm making pepper sauce today.  I hope this typing is OK.  The air has a
spicy warmth to it.  o_O

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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