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paper-machine comments on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (353)
It's not imaginary; the protocol is described in one of the appendices, and I've implemented it once.
Cool! Do you remember the “performance” of the protocol? (That is, how much work it takes to exchange how much information, in approximate human-scale terms, and its approximate security in usual cryptographic language.)
Sadly, Bruce Schneier's "Solitaire" is broken. That break was one of the things that got me into crypto!
Can you explain how broken it is to this layperson?
Warning: What follows likely has major technical errors - basically all I know about cryptography I learned from Cryptonomicon.
From the description, the random numbers are not evenly generated so that what should have a 1/26 chance of happening has a 1/22.5. And the output is heavily biased.
How much does that matter? We can easily decrypt Enigma with brute force right now. Is the difference in the amount of computing power to brute force Solitaire all that much different from what is expected?
In other words, encryptions with 256-bit keys are harder to crack than 128-bit keys. But is the problem with Solitaire 20-years-safe vs. 10-years-safe, or is it 20-years-safe vs. 12-months-safe?