Quest_techie wrote:
zodiac knew more about cryptography than astronomy
building relativly unbreakable cipher for one time use with a -small cross section of text- isn't that hard, but very few people could actually do it, crypto is a niche interest, I've only encountered probably 10 people who really give a damn about it at all
Aw heck, **I**'ve done THAT! And it was a rotating cipher, so letter frequency analysis or cracking a given word would have been little to no help. It wasn't hard to setup/cipher/decipher, but it WOULD be very hard to crack. Using multiple passes, foreign languages, reversals, etc... Would make it practically impossible. BTW it wasn't really an interest for me. Any IDIOT knows that the 2 biggest failings of ciphers are letter frequency and progressive cracking. Prevent those, and an easy cipher could be frustrating to crack to say the least!
I DID try(For perhaps a day or so) to break a VERY old cipher done by someone that wasn't known for doing such things. I didn't crack it. Oh well, perhaps millions have tried for over a hundred years, and I never heard of it being cracked. Well, one page was partially cracked(in the mid 70s) that had promise, but it didn't help.
I ALSO studied ciphers for some ecommerce work I did. I wanted to make a near unbreakable cipher. Even the FBI may have trouble with THAT. Then again, it IS a multipass rotating butchered hashed key with 192 bit rjindael. EVEN if they DID manage to crack one record, which is unlikely, it would be little help in breaking others!
AGAIN, this isn't an interest for me!
Steve