Nanashi comments on A pair of free information security tools I wrote - LessWrong

17 Post author: Nanashi 11 April 2015 11:03PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (97)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nanashi 13 April 2015 09:42:46PM *  5 points [-]

Sorry Christian but I am going to stop replying after this one. I'm not trying to be a dick, it's just that at this point I think continuing our conversation is going to confuse readers more than it will help them. The concepts you are referring to and sources you are citing are only tangentially applicable to the conversation at hand.

  1. The fact that it is possible to collide hashes, signatures, etc. is well known and obvious. The reason it is not a concern is the extreme difficulty in producing a collision. As indicated above, you would have to brute force your way through 10^77 different combinations to guarantee a successful collision.

  2. The section you cited describes PGP encryption, not signatures. They are two entirely different things. PGP signatures do not involve session keys.

  3. You can manipulate the output of (or "add specific entropy to") any hash function. It is, however, absurdly difficult to convey meaningful information in the output of a hash function. See above regarding the amount of work required. Furthermore, because a private key is longer than a PGP signature, it is literally impossible to encode the key in the signature.

  4. The code uses a library, which means it supports multiple functions. The vast majority of which are not used by the script.

You are referring to several traits which are common to almost all cryptographic systems, yet you are implying these are traits unique to PGP. Furthermore, you are describing these traits with loaded language that paints them as weaknesses, when in fact, they are known, accounted-for limitations.

Anyone familiar with cryptography will gain nothing from reading this exchange, and anyone unfamiliar with cryptography will likely be confused and mislead.