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What Would You Do With a New Form of Encryption?
Kip Knight asks: "I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. I would obviously like to feed my family on the fruits of my endeavour but don't see much hope in the open source route. My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'. Since I haven't got my export license to speak about the details yet, I won't describe further. The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP). The disadvantage is carrying around a very large digital key (which could easily fit on one of those USB memory key fobs). My question is this: Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" While the claims made by the submittor have yet to withstand the crucial test of time (and prying eyes), if you had developed a new form of encryption, what would you do?
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... patent it, *then* you can figure out what business model you want to use.
Note, however, that the claims made by the submittor is basically a laundry list of the kinds of claims that makes seasoned cryptographers go "oh no, not again."
then encrypt the patent.
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Try to take over the world...
Fact is, if i need money, then liscense it to a company who will do the dirty work for me and live off the proceeds. If it is, in fact, a brilliant discovery, you should fight for provisions which will ensure some amount of open review.
Not everyone who comes up with such a proven idea is a software developer, and they may not be able to live off of creating cutting edge software or maintaining said software for a living. The bazaar method doesn't apply to theory.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
whether or not is actually been tested? I would worry first that the encryption standard actually is as robust as the claim before waving it the air asking about whether or not there is a profit margin involved. Without review or exposure it cannot substantiate the claim so it does not really matter if it is patented or not does it? I sure as hell wouldn't use it.
I've been sitting on an invention for six months now.
Butt is a prior art, iirc.
Ten bucks says five mins after he publishes it it will get broken.
"many-time" otp are quite nonsense. See the problem is people think that good ciphers can have security approaching the OTP. The OTP is an absolutely different type of security.
For instance, *no* ammount of time is sufficient to break an OTP without the key. Whereas a block cipher can be broken at least in theory.
I'd suggest to the original poster that he try to get his design published. When it gets horribly broken it will serve as a learning experience as how "not" to approach science.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
two recommended routes:
- call USPTO and ask for assistance
- call NSA and ask for a job
I would patent it and sell it because if you present this to the public free of charge then other companies will take advantage of this. Think of your family first and be a capitalist.
It'll be interesting to see how he gets around the most critical issue in one time pads. Never re-use them. There are several interesting stories about one time pads finally being re-used and years old messages being decrypted along with the new stuff.
------------------------
Jack not name, jack job!
Don't do anything to make it public. Just keep it for your own personal use.
That would be the best encryption you can have. The one only you know about.
the problems with those patents about ecryption involved is the fact the us government may try and halt it for security reasons. I would suggest that you open source it but use a restrictive license that does not allow to view it unless with your permission...
It's heartwarming that you've invented a new form of crypto. However, before anyone takes it seriously, you're going to have to reveal it to the cryptographic community. "Many eyes make bugs shallow" as they say, and in few places is this more important than in crypto. An algorithm you've looked at 10000 times may have a logical error you've never caught, that would be glaring to a knowledgable pair of fresh eyes.
Plus no self-respecting paranoid freak is ever going to use a new cipher that hasn't had any time in the spotlight. Release it to the field and ask for comments.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Yeah. Right. Let me guess. It's a one time pad, but one where the unused code groups get remapped/reused, which is just another type of one time pad.
Best Slashdot Co
That this invention is a bunch of crap. Most likely scenario: inventor releases a press release that gets widely reported and the most secure thing ever invented. Claims like "unbreakable" and "proven secure" and "many time pad" will be thrown around freely.
And then someone with a decoder ring will crack that puppy wide open.
Yawn. Snake oil.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Don't let the socialists con you into "giving back to the community." Do for your family and yourself and then worry about be altruistic. If you don't patent the idea, you don't have any recourse if you change your mind. If you patent it, you can always give it away later.
The only way people are going to use it / trust it is if the code / algorithm can be closely examined.
If you give out the code, the only way to still make money is patent it.
If you say I got a great algoithm but you can't see it, people will just laught at you.
People will laught at you anyway, go get a job.
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
so you want us to decide what's more important to you? I'd say give it to the world, but that's my own opinion. that's what this whole thing is going to be... opinion. what's more important? money or ideals? it gets trickier (as mentioned) when you've got to put food on the table. Trickier still when you consider the investment (time and money) needed to see your invention pay off. as with any big life decision you just need to look at all the courses of action and their consequences, and chose the one that suits your life goals best.
aoeu
First, I wouldn't "Ask Slashdot"
(sound of pitter-pattering many greedy feet scurrying to the nearest PTO)
Second:
1. Patent new encryption algorithm.
2. Sell to highest bidder.
3. ???
4. Profit.
Ah well, you could always be more philanthrophic than me, and support FSF, but hell, I'm just a capitalist at heart.
I think you should trade this patent for some stock in VA Systems! How could that fail to make you wealthy?!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
IF you patent the idea, you retain all rights to give it away freely, sell it or whatever, to whomever. If you don't you lose your rights over the invention.
I say patent it and then decide based on what offers you get. Once you patent it you can shop around for people to license it to. You can define the terms of the license (3 years and then you can offer it as GPL or NOT)
Don't be a fool, its your blood and sweat, you deserve to own it.
Give it away and let your family starve, obviously.
Hell comes in bags now? Spoiled youngsters.
slashdot!=valid HTML
nbHF48FKJH4F;kjh4LKJHhNB498CN4I
SKLJ4H9sdflkjh48B3498HW4IFN4IN8
OKDNJ48458DI4.SL4993;W5497GKH48
2HCB4KBHS843,JNS,JH43872B34JYB4
ZMNB48lkjh48BB4JHG8cbhbj8675309
Quickly encrypt all the pr0n on my hard drives, since my wife begins to understand how to use the PC!
release it at a crypto convention and get a reality check as it is broken by one of the people at the con before you go home.....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
If you are a professional cryptographer, you should know the answer to your own question. If you aren't a professional cryptographer, then chances are _very_ good that your technology will be broken or otherwise made useless as soon as it becomes public.
That's not to say you aren't an intelligent person, but it takes a lot more than one great mind to accomplish your claim, in my opinion.
If you check the usenet sci.crypt FAQ it ridicules the steady stream of people who invent "unbreakable" encryption techniques. You might give it a read. Most of the time it turns out that there are one or (usually) more fatal flaws in new encryption schemes.
evaluating the inflight meal on our black helicopters.
(posting as ac from deep within the NSA)
From my somewhat scanty introduction to patent laws, you might want to be careful about how much you reveal about it before you file a patent or at least provisional paperwork. My company recently did work to patent a product and we were told we couldn't really discuss it with many people. Furthermore, doing an openly public action such as showing it at a trade show before applying the patent would seriously jeopardize the patent process. Now I'm not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, so I can't really say how valid an objection this is, but I'm sharing it here in case it's relevant. If it is correct, I want you to be able to decide whether to patent and not have it decided for you. (Any real experts have a better assessment).
Patent:
A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
License:
Official or legal permission to do or own a specified thing. See Synonyms at permission.
I would patent it, then license it. It could be licensed for free use to non-profit groups, and governments could be required to pay a yearly sum.
But that sounds almost too easy to me :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
However, I concur with the other posters - If you reuse any part of the key, it's not a one-time pad. If you generate any part of it algorithmically, it's not a one-time pad. The history of crypography is littered with "replacements" for the one-time pad that turned out to be trivially breakable. This could be the first example that turned out to be worthwhile, but the odds are against you.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Unless you're pretty sure you have a big winner on your hands, it probably isn't worth patenting. All a patent gives you is the right to ask the courts to stop a competitor from using your invention. Even after you go through all the rigamarole of having a patent granted, you still have to renew the patent and I believe there is a requirement that you show you are actually exploiting the invention toward a real product or service. Overall it's a long costly process that does not create any new wealth, it only gives you a big stick to smack the competition with. As an introduction, I recommend "Patent it yourself" published by Nolo Press.
Patenting something (properly) will cost thousands of dollars and will require a patent lawyer.
The US is a first-to-invent not a first-to-patent country, so make sure you have a hardcopy of your invention description dated and notarized.
Then let some Net crypto people beat on your idea, make sure you say "Patent Pending."
If it holds up, you should easily be able to raise the money to get it patented properly. (Actually, if so, email me, I may know a few investors)
Judging from your description, I'd say your invention has a high probability of not truly doing what you think it does. Developing novel and useful cryptographic technology is a rare occurance, generally done by people who have a ton of experience in the area. No point in wasting money if it won't stand up to 30 minutes in sci.crypt
Historically proprietary encryption schemes have faired badly in the market (RSA and RCx being possible exceptions). Why would any one want to pay to use a encryption method when there are so many free and effective alternates. If its not free few will use it, if few use it then there is little incentice for anyone to use it.
Go read back issues of Crypto-Gram and read up on all the lame hype laden "unbreakable" crypto schemes (often based on one time pads) that they destroy and then laugh at. If after reading all that you're still convinced you've got something, sure, go see a patent attorney.
My guess is you'll end up saving yourself the patent fees and a fair amount of humiliation by just letting it drop.
patent it, then sell it to one of the big boys, like IBM or Sun.
dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
Information theory proves that the One-Time Pad (OTP) is optimal - it cannot be improved.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
The OTP has no known-plaintext vulnerability. By submitting even a chosen plaintext to be encrypted, and studying the encrypted message, you only learn the piece of the One-Time pad used on your own content. It does not help you break any other part of any other message.
The only way to break a OTP is to get a copy the pad or by breaking the random number generator used to create the pad.
This post's claim is the usual nonsense. So patent it if you wish - release it if you wish - I doubt anyone will find it usable.
It is impossible to make money selling a cryptographic algorithm. It's difficult, but not impossible, to make money selling a cryptographic protocol.
Who said it? Bruce Schneier, one of the current gurus of crypto. Where did he say it? Here on Slashdot
The whole article is worth a read.
My perspective is that I seriously doubt your claims. Until there is strong peer review of your entire cryptosystem from top to bottom, I won't touch it. Unless it solves some problem with other cryptosystems already in use, the market won't touch it. If you can these two objections then you might have a shot at some money. Otherwise...
There are tons of symmetric encryption methods ranging from patented to totally free. They all have the property of being effectively unbreakable with decent keysizes. Unlike your proposed method, they dont require ridiculously large keysizes. I really dont see the commercial potential, or even the potential for significant non-commercial use.
The method you describe would actually have significant *disadvantages*, such as being ill-suited for use with asymmetric cyphers.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
I dont see how a one time pad wouldnt have these properties. Note that the name is One Time Pad, so if you reuse the pad, its not one time anymore.
patent it if you have that incling. In todays market, trying to make a buck off of encryption is going to be hard. Look at NAI and PGP. I personally prefer the OpenSource over ClosedSource but will use the best product out there that is used by the masses.
Releasing a plugin for GnuPG/PGP would allow it to be used in a more widespread audience in a quicker timeframe.
Scott
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
Just because you patent the information, does not mean that it cannot be made available to the Open Source community. There is plenty of software out there that is available for free for personal use, but requires licensing for business use.
/.'ers for $20 each.. I know I'll be more than happy to help!
Patenting the software will ensure that *YOU* get some of that dough, while ensuring that *YOU* decide how it is going to be used, and who will use it. If you do not patent it, chances are that someone else will figure out a way to patent something extremely similar to it, and then charge *YOU* to use your software.
If you need some help with the $20k, let me know. I am almost sure you can raise it by asking 1000
---
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
10 to 1, there is a huge hole in the idea.
Then I'd try to get some peer review. There are a lot of people around to do this, they will sign NDAs to do it. (Skipjack and the RCx algorithms proved that)
Then if it is still standing, I'd get a patent to buy time to figure out what to do with it.
The first thing I would do is change my ISP/e-mail address.. no one is going to believe you with your current AOL one.
1. Sign a non-disclosure agreement with a reputable encryption expert.
...
2. Pay said expert a fee to examine your system and comment on its merit.
3. If your system has potential but needs adjustment, repeat #1 and #2 as necessary, if possible with different experts (within the limits of your financial resources, of course).
4. If you are still convinced that your system is worthy, hire a patent lawyer and patent it.
5. Don't try to sell it on your own. Instead, try selling it to an encryption firm or software distributor, using the expert opinions from #1 and #2 to bolster your sales pitch.
6. If you find a buyer, try to license your encryption system rather then sell it outright.
7.
8. Profit!
I'm facing a similar problem with my perpetual motion machine. I'd like to give it to the world, so everyone can benefit, but I'd also like a nice new Mercedes.
I suppose Prism Research feels it could use a little venture capital...
Quoting:
Then, who cares about a patent on something that doesn't work and isn't secure?
Crypto security and validation comes from peer review. Don't lose your time.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Release it to the world free, the only way people make any money these days is with pop-up windows anyway..
.com and have it hidden inbetween gobs of banners. ;)
So, release it on your
- Talk to a lawyer and tell him that you have an idea. If it REALLY IS a good idea, the small investment in a good IP lawyer at that point is a good thing.
The idea still needs community work and approval, but you still want to retain ownership should the idea succeed. He should advise you that a patent is a bad idea at that point, a better idea would be one of many publication or trade secret options.
- Talk with the community. Post everything about it to all the crypto newsgroups. Get the routines published in the proper community forums and conferences. If it is good enough it will make it into any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Encourage feedback. That cannot be stressed enough. ANY GOOD SECURITY MECHINISM, PATENTED OR PUBLIC, MUST HAVE ALL ITS PARTS STUDIED CAREFULLY BY EXPERTS. There is no way around that.
- Write and publish the extensions. Write the GPG extension, and extensions for the Windows shell, and Outlook, and Eudora, and Pegasus, and everything else. If it doesn't get adopted it won't matter if you patent it since it won't get used.
- If at the end of the year it looks profitable, patent it. Your lawyer should have told you that also. If you know that it won't be possible to recoup the money, don't do it.
So that should answer the original question: "Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" If at the end of the first year you haven't made a dime and haven't had the routine published or accepted in the community, you probably never will.frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Does it bother anyone else that the creator of the encryption scheme that will save the world uses AOL? (check his email addy...)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there have been a lot of great mathematicians and cryptographers that have tried to design good, secure algorithms over the past few decades. Very few have actually managed to create algorithms that'll stand up under analysis. You may think you've done so, but it's going to take a lot to convince everyone of that.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Nah, screw it. I'd just do it because it would be funny to use real encryption to compensate for fake encryption while locking the greedy corporations out of their own products. Turnabout is a bitch, eh?
is it really worth it if the padd is: 0xFFFFFFFF?
Well, the first thing I would do is wk6bnbzrqremf62374blksjlkslkjsdsjssl slkj2l3aks4eibnmmcoi422j almslkjasoiv asalkmdc lka2dmv sl55y as qw3e vuc64mzplka sdlkf ol64kas3sd lkj
Table-ized A.I.
You state that it will take 20G's this is not quite true. When you put in a patent request,
it should cost a couple hundred bucks at most.
I have read that the process takes about 2 years before they will get back to you saying YEA or NAY. It is at that point that you must come up with the money for the patent.
The trick is patent PENDING. Once you have put in the request your invention is protected (assuming that the patent office comes back in 2 years to grant the request)
If you believe it will work, then scrape up the dough for the application. Once you have applied, you can then get third party verification, or release your own application to test the market, and still be protected.
P.S. if you are in the USA, check out the Small Business Association, and their SCORE program.
This should get you on the right track.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
You say that it is ``... proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks .... Can you prove that? Can you prove it well enough that a mathematician won't laugh at you? If you haven't gotten this reviewed by some competent cryptographers, the whole issue is probably moot anyway.
As for your explicit question: `` Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions ...'' I suspect that the answer is ``probably not''. PGP doesn't seem to have sold very well, and cryptography doesn't seem to be a hot seller right now. Patent or not, this may not be a big money maker. A better way to have phrased your question might have been: ``Is this invention likely to make enough money that I could come out ahead by patenting it?''
A better place to have asked your question might have been a forum where cryptographers hang out. I'm not sure that a lot of them will see this here on slashdot. If you have some sort of credentials as a cryptographer or mathematician, you might try sending emails to some patent-holding cryptographers, and ask about their opinions on your algorithm, and their experiences with patents.
See what I've been reading.
Iay avehay ay ewnay encryptionay ethodmay ootay. Itay amecay otay emay inay ay eamdray.
Best Windows Freeware
Get a provisional patent, then publish and see what happens. A provisional patent is cheap ($20-40) and it establishes the date of submission. The paper work is also very light and the patent office doesn't even take a look at it. If you decide not to follow up on it, then you lose out on $20. It's the best way to go.
If it is something as silly as having a really big pad into which you index with a key, or double (triple, quadruple, etc...) flip/rotate/seed from, you might not want to bother wasting your time trying to patent it.
Of course, the USPTO will let you patent just about anything, so it might be worth it anyway.
Honestly, most of the people here (the ones who aren't joking) are right. Patent it first, and then figure out what you want to do with it. Don't show it to some company with a flimsy NDA. At most, show it to someone you trust so they can tell you that you're off your rocker.
"The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP)."
OTP is not vulnerable to brute force attacks. Unless you use the key more than once. But in that case, it's no longer an OTP, is it?
Known plaintext attacks really aren't applicable to OTPs. Since key material in an OTP can only be used once, if you have any two of the plaintext, the key material, and the ciphertext, you have all the information you need. So what do you mean by OTPs having known plaintext attack weakness? Do you mean that if you have the ciphertext and the plaintext you can recover the keying material? That is certainly true, but doesn't really matter since any intelligent use of OTPs always requires that plaintext and key material NOT be exposed to your enemy, and without two of the three, your enemy provably cannot discover any of the other unknowns. Or do you mean something else?
Your statement and claims so closely match the modus operandi of snake oil crypto vendors that I seriously doubt you have anything of value in your invention.
I suggest you go ahead and patent your idea, then present it to the world. I doubt it will stand up, but hey, you could always form a snake-oil selling company (or use an existing one) to try to recoup your patent expenses. Such companies love to tout "patented" algorithms.
And in the unlikely event your discovery truly is revolutionary, a patent is just good sense.
Go for it!
But how did you get the monkeys to wear the pants?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Chorus:
What will we do with new encryption?
What will we do with new encryption?
What will we do with new encryption?
Early in the morning.
Ask Slashdot - get these same answers:
Ask Slashdot - get these same answers:
Ask Slashdot - get these same answers:
Early in the morning.
"Don't bow down to patent pressure,"
"Don't bow down to patent pressure,"
"Don't bow down to patent pressure,"
Early in the morning.
"Open source is ALWAYS better,"
"Open source is ALWAYS better,"
"Open source is ALWAYS better,"
Early in the morning.
"Don't forget Step 3: Profit!!!"
"Don't forget Step 3: Profit!!!"
"Don't forget Step 3: Profit!!!"
Early in the morning.
"Why not build a Beowulf cluster?"
"Why not build a Beowulf cluster?"
"Why not build a Beowulf cluster?"
Early in the morning.
That's what you do with new encryption,
When you ask on Slashdot.
damn!, beat me to it! Arrrrg!
You need legal protection to profit. Patent this.
Do not doubt that American corporations will rob you blind if you try to do anything but patent your discovery.
If you patent the idea, you can then control how it is used -- including permitting its use in Open Source or other software. As some people are aware, Dennis Richie holds a patent on the 'set-uid' bit concept. In fact, patenting it yourself (and thus allowing you to set the terms of its use) is probably better for the Open Source and Free Software interests since that would ensure some other, less friendly, entity could not patent it later -- if you do not patent it, someone else will (even if they shouldn't be able to [the uspo being so imfamously incompetent]).
Yea and the titanic was thought to be unsinkable... Unless its been out in circulation for attempts to be made, i would hold off on the claims.
1st move...Patent it
The classic OTP was a pad of sheets with keys for character by character substititutions. Once a sheet is used for one message it is destroyed. See a more complete definition of OTP for more details. Since a given key is only used once, known-plaintext attacks can't compromise multiple messages.
For even more info see Why Are One-Time Pads Perfectly Secure? where it says that OTP is "perfectly secure, as long as the key is random and is not compromised".
So is poster claiming to have found a flaw in OTP?
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
I can't believe this hasn't had the crap flamed out of it, let alone get a +2.
Obscurity isn't a great security model. I am not going to say that it has no place in security either.
Just because I am the only one that knows that I XOr'd my message with the umteenth row in a pascal triangle, doesn't mean that someone won't be able to see the pattern, or use other attacks to figure it out.
It does make a good, but vulnerable, security system a little better, but shouldn't be the main part of your security system, or even a major part.
According to my IP Law professor, there are 3 reasons to patent something:
1) To prevent someone else from using your invention
2) To ensure your further use of an invention
3) The third reason escapes me...
Anyway, the important thing is number 2. Patent this thing, because if someone else comes along and patents it, prior art or not, you will be out of luck. Chances are, you'll patent this, and the NSA will come along and 'make you an offer you can't refuse' for the exclusive rights, in which case you'll be a very rich person.
OTPs are absolutely unbreakable without the key. The reason is that if you encrypt a plaintext file with a proper OTP key (ie key as long as the message, truly random), if you try to decrypt the message by brute force, you will end up with every possible combination of plain text in every language possible for that length of message. How will you know which is which?
nbHF48FKJH4F;kjh4LKJHhNB498CN4I
SKLJ4H9sdflkjh48B3498HW4IFN4IN8
OKDNJ48458DI4.SL4993;W5497GKH48
2HCB4KBHS843,JNS,JH43872B34JYB4
ZMNB48lkjh48BB4JHG8cbhbj8675309
How dare you insult my mother like that!
Table-ized A.I.
The licence you use is not related to the patent you put out on it. Put out a patent for it, and release the code for personal and non-profit uses for free. Charge up to the wazoo for commercial usage.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
...but that's been covered by about 20 other comments at this point. :)
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
This article is either:
obvious Snake Oil or classic Slashdot Troll
Actually there's a very urgent need for standard end-to-end encryption in IP. A few stories back there's a Q/A session with Vint Cerf who very interstingly mentions the following:
4) TCP/IP
by sdjunky
considering your work with TCP/IP protocols what would you change now that you can look back retrospectively to how it has been used/misused. What would you incorporate into designs now that weren't even thought of at the time that TCP/IP was created?
Vint:
I suppose I wish I had decided on a larger address space than 32 bits! (that decision was made in 1977 after a year of argument about it). Moreover, I now believe that it would have been wise for us to incorporate into the design principles the notion that every end unit ("thing with an IP address") has a way to "authenticate" itself to any other end unit. As it stands now, these end devices have to declare their own IP addresses and that leads to an architectural opportunity for deception and spoofing. In addition to that, I wish there had been some opportunity to develop end/end cryptographic methods such as IPSEC to increase the confidentiality of information passing through the net. Ironically, beginning in 1975 I began work on a secured version of Internet with the National Security Agency. Because the details of this design were classified, none of this design could be shared with the uncleared developers at universities and industry engaged in the unfolding design of the Internet.
-----
As it stands now, these end devices have to declare their own IP addresses and that leads to an architectural opportunity for deception and spoofing
Unfortunately it also leads to finding your ass in jail. Remember this guy?. That could be any of us if the RIAA gets its way in court, and many of us don't want it that way. Right now there are about 4,000,000 users running Kazaa. And if the courts decide that ISPs are obligated to tell the RIAA what users are doing, this could become a very unpleasant reality for each and every one of us. What we need is an end-to-end encryption standard that provides true anonymity. I.e. something that ensures that a 3rd party can't "sniff" packets and link IP addresses to thier source.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
...licence it under a GPL-like licence :)
The chances of making money out of a patent are slim. Moreover, the cryptography market is "canibalized" - even if your system is, as you claim, a lot better than the existing techniques, most people will still use something that stood the test of time (e.g. RSA, which has become free)
Anyway, the US Patent system allows you to publish your idea one year before you file for a patent. Get some peer reviews (a proof is simply not a proof if kept secret) before embarking on a patent adventure.
The Raven
Encrypt my mail to keep it from CowboyNeal's prying eyes.
(This article should have been a poll question.)
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
...how a known plaintext attack can be made against a OTP? You can find out the parts of the key associated with the parts of the message you already know, but that doesn't help you determine anything else about the text: the keys in a OTP are random, not periodic.
[ home ]
Encrypt the specs and spread them to the world, allowing the first one who cracks the encryption to patent the method.
If none succeeds in a reasonable amount of time, then patent it (it's a good encryption method).
If it gets cracked, then don't waste your money patenting it.
Signatures are for stupids.
If you have any interest in making money then definitely patent it. That will cost you a few bucks to do, but it should be well worth it. You can then make a shareware library (closed source) if that is the route you would like and allow for the library to be included in certain forms with programs such as GPG. Personally I wouldn't plan on making much money through any shareware sort of scheme. If you are really into making money talk to some of the bigger names in encryption and sell them your patent or a license to use your encryption method. If you go through this route you can get some money up front and some royalties down the line. Makeing a shareware/open source version available before dealing with those companies can make your method seem much less worthwhile to those companies.
Establish your date of protection by filing a provisional patent application with the USPTO. This application carries with it an $80 filing fee and most attorneys will do the paperwork for less than $300. The paperwork required is very straightfoward (a one page application) so you can actually do it yourself if you want. Nevertheless, the important thing to do is establish a legal date of protection so you can weigh your options over time.
:).
The provisional patent is granted by the USPTO without investigating the claims your application documentation makes. In fact, the documentation you file with the USPTO does not have to make any claims what so ever (nor does it have to be in any special format). It is purely a dump of what your invention does and how it does it. The two requirements are:
1. You must file a real patent application within a year otherwise you lose the date of invention established by filing the provisional.
2. Your real patent application must derive atleast one claim from the documentation filed with the provisional.
The provisionals are not made public so you can avoid anyone else sniffing around what you are doing until you get the real application prepared if that makes you feel better
You can get more information at the USPTO website. Look here for information on provisional applications.
Has slashdot ran a story on quantum cryptogtaphy yet? specifically, this one:
http://physicsweb.org/article/news/6/10/5
Basically it's perfect encryption, anyone that knows better please tell me.
Here is what you do:
Take the source code and add tons of comments in it with you name and the date you encrypted it. The using your encryption, code the source and post it to the newsgroups and mail out CDROMs with the code to 100 news magazines. Quietly leak the code to a few key people. Watch as MS implements it into Windows XP 2004 SP4 claiming they invented it and pounce on them claiming massive damages. There you now own MS and can rule the world WITH YOUR FLAMING FINGER OF ABSOLUTE ULTRA MEGA SUPER CHAMPIONSHIP TURBO ENHANCED EDITION FINGER OF STEEL COPPER IRON SILVER SODIUM MEGA DEATH!!! MUAHAHAHAHHAHA!!
Oh wait they never pay their damages...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
you cant license it to the NSA.
why would they buy it in the first place? they can use it and not pay for it. what are you going to do? take the NSA to court?
I'd eventually open source it because that may way more people will be able to pick through it andfind the potential bugs it may have, thus giving it a much better chance at being fool proof and secure. Thus, you'll have a better product behind your name.
You ask this question in a forum that is populated by GPL-advocates. What kind of answers do you think you will get?
ROT13 all of my research data.
Tournament Management Online &
... some plain text and some cipher text. If any one can deduce the way your n-time(n >= 1) pad then forget the patent. One the other hand, if your n-time pad is unbreakable expect some time to pass before all of the best cryptoanalists have had a wack at breaking it. Then after that expect the NSA to come knocking at your door and telling you what your rights are for disseminating the n-time pad. This happend to IBM with their "Lucifer" encryption scheme known as DES - or Triple-DES now. Finally, does your code eat much processor time if it does then it will also be limited in use even after passing rigorus testing. Check out AES/Rijndael on google - uses 50k of memory VERY important for cell/PDA application.... That is all. SittingBull
Make a perpetual Mercedes or perpetual Ford Pinto, whichever is more affordable.
Just ask yourself, What would Jesus do?
Actually I think a new Mercedes would be obsoleted by your perpetual motion machine.
Only the engine would be obsoleted. He can pull the motor and power the Mercedes with a perpetual motion machine.
1. For you to say "Patent Pending" you must have actually applied for the patent.
2. After you disclose it publically, as sci.crypt would most certainly qualify, you only have 1 years to patent it in the US, and you have ruled out the ability to patent it in many other countries.
3. Patenting it yourself with the help of a good book is better than disclosing it with the hope of patenting it later.
4. If you really want to see if it holds up, find a professor who researches cryptography, and discuss it with him. But be sure to make it clear to him (in writing) that this is for review only and is confidential.
-Alison
Your post suggests you haven't yet filed your application, yet you have disclosed what look to be a a potential claim.
Now, it's called "prior art". As is the following...
So you have a "big key" that looks like a one time pad.
You then generate keys by purturbing data from that pad using any of a number of existing encryption tools. (Yes, I'm skilled in the art).
I already use such a system. I share a CD-ROM of white noise with my buddy. The tool goes something like this...
1) accepts a "session key" from the user which addresses a byte on the pad.
2) The following 256 bits are used to purturb the key that will be found in step (4).
3) The following 32 bits are used to select a new byte offset on the pad.
4) the 256 bits at address (3) are purturbed using the data from (2).
5) a single block of data is encrypted with the result of (4).
6) Goto (2).
This turns a 650MB CD-R into a pad 650MB squared in size. Or a 422,500,000,000,000,000 byte pad.
BTW, free software is nowhere for individual contributors to earn a living. Only people that profit from USE of the software gain finanical advantage by contributing under the free (GPL/BSD) licenses.
Shareware is a joke.
Nagware - Timeware - maybe.
Putting a substandard many-time-pad into production on false premises is irresponsible. If what you say is correct, then this invention should remain in the laboratory.
You risk exposing customers to risk created by cheap corporations who want to save expenses associated with OTP technology. This would be fundamentally broken technology. It is irresponsible to release technology that is fundamentally broken.
Stop the brainwash
Go over to www.uspto.gov and there are instructions and forms for filing your own patents. Last I looked at the fees, you can file for something under $400 if you are a small entity (individual inventors generally would qualify). Once you have filed for a patent, you can start negotiating with companies to sell it. If you want to allow public use for free apps I would recommend this. File for patent, then disclose your algorithm. There are more fees down the road if a patent issues, so having a period where there can be public comment might save you money if there is something wrong with the method. Patents take 2-3 years (maybe more) to issue, but if you have filed you can try to sell the idea. You can of course claim copyright on what you write, though that won't help much. You could I suppose also require those downloading your documents to agree not to implement, and claim DMCA protection (showing how ridiculous THAT law is) even if no patent issued. But that might cause some to just ignore it who might critique it, and would make you look like a shyster...
I agree with the people who say to patent it. This gives you some options. From there you might some up with some license that is similar in nature to QPL. If people want to utilize it in open source applications they can do so for free, and if they need to use it in commercial applications they will have to pay you for it...
first, name it "Ginger"!
What is it this time? A PRNG for pad and a password for seed? Some trivial massaging of used pad? <sigh>
Post the algorithm on sci.crypt. Wait twelve hours. Replies will come in pointing you to the FAQ. Go read it. Feel sheepish for not understanding the OTP. No damage done. You'll soon be forgotten, like all the other clowns claiming improved "variations" of the OTP.
Plus side? You may feel relieved that you spent no money going for a patent.
No need to thank me.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Like a lot of other submitters I really doubt your claims.
Why not do this. Find a cryptography scientist, and give him this challenge:
Ask him to look at your algorithm. He should swear that if it is an unbreakable, reusable OTP, he will not to tell anyone until it is patented. If not, he can do whatever.
Any expert is bound to take that challenge. If it works, you will be indifferent. If not, you save yourself the money and time of patent applications.
Tor
But Kip has discovered a truly remarkable proof which this article is too small to contain.
Surely PATENT IT.
Please i developing somethig like your job but o another kind of application could you told me where are you patenting you new "Thing", because i want to do the same!.
Thanks.
If it were me, I would be inclined to release it as open-source. Although money could be made from you effort, sometimes, although it's hard to do, one must see the bigger picture. The advancement of our society depends upon the sharing of information. What if we all had to pay a fee to be able to light a fire, or if E=mc^2 were patented? Maybe those examples aren't very good, but I think the point is there. If we continually close new technology to others, we run the risk of being completely bound by the cumulitve cost of all of the technology that goes into each new technology. Eventually, most of the technology available could be available only to a select few---and we return to the Dark Ages. This is where it starts. As a society, we need to consider the future of our society. To me, that is the underlying principle of open-source. That is the reason I try to use open-source as much as possible. So, I can't tell you what to do, but I would like you to consider the long term advancement of society as well as your own short-term benefits.
I doubt the inventor understands how big a problem this is:
- A real OTP is kept in a physically-secure
location. This invention talks about a USB
gadget, which is easily stolen or accidentally
lost.
- A USB memory keychain cannot tell you if
it has been compromised if you've already
used it once. An OTP can be sealed.
- A real OTP is, well, used once. If
compromised, it compromises one message.
The loss of this invention compromises many
messages.
- A real OTP is immediately destroyed after
use. Keeping the key around for multiple
uses greatly increases the risk of
compromise over time.
All of the above - without even examining the theory - make the invention less secure in practice than the OTP. A huge disadvantage of the OTP is of course its expense and inconvenience, but that's exactly where it draws its strength.This is as insightful as saying that it is the greatest security device ever.
What did we learn about always and never in taking tests? They are almost never the right answer.
There is no such thing as perfect security. Obscurity isn't any different. To say it doesn't work at all is a little naive.
Quite a bit of information theory is based on knowing that there is something to know. I can learn a lot about you just by knowing that you have secrets, and who you share them with. If I can figure out how to keep this obscured, I have just increased my security on more peg. If you don't know there is a lock to pick, that is even better than having the brand new biometric lock installed, I keep my finger attached to my body longer.
A lock by itself sucks.
Cryptography is only as strong as the intelligence of the people that leave the plaintext around on their hard disk.
Obscurity has its place in a good security scheme, its place.
You are a complete joke! I will bet you anything that your so-called invention turns out to be completely worthless.
Nothing is better than a one-time pad. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand cryptography. Anything else can only be less secure. And variations on the one-time pad is still a one-time pad!
Even if you donated this for free, **no-one** is going to use it. No one. I can't believe you actually deluded yourself into thinking that you have created something so grand.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Please, do us all a favor and patent it, and keep us informed by setting up a web site, so we can laugh at you even more!
A one time pad made with truly random data (if there is such a thing) is absolutly unbreakable. Yes, completly unbreakable, even if you had a quantum computer an a hunred trillion, billion years to run it. The reason this is the case is because there essentially is no "algorithm" to break, it is just an XOR of the plaintext with random data.
That said, however, you have to throw away the key after every use, because if you use it more than once, then it becomes possible to do some statistical math and begin the long journey to finding the key.
The reason this kind of encryption is not being used every day is that it's fundamental flaw is getting the key from one party to the other without it getting stolen in between. The paradox is, if you have a way of sending the key in a secure manner, then why don't you just send the original data in that way and save yourself the trouble.
"Oh, I could make a hat... or a brooch... or a teradactyl!"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
There's even a better method that has been discussed for years. Document everything. Mail it to yourself. The postmark is sufficient proof of the date.
It doesn't matter if you intend to make a product or wait until someone else uses your best kept secret. If you plan to ramp up a production line to pump out your products and are sued by someone who finally does (and will) get a patent on your idea, just show them the evidence. Rather than having their patent nullified due to prior art, they will give you cash to shut up. Same if someone else makes it and they happened to patent it. Threaten to sell your prior art to others. Hush money will come your way (or someone will come over to fit you with a pair of concrete shoes.)
You can be assured this will happen. The introduction of new technology makes new obvious things possible. Its a race with time. Better put the cards in your pocket and hide them until the dealer has a lot of cash on the table.
I don't know about you, but I live in the United States. Here we invest money so that we can make more money. I am not sure about how socialists or communists make money, but I do not care, for I am a capitlist living in California. California has the 6th largest economy in the world. If you want to make money off of your idea, you need to patent it. If dont want others to make money off of your idea then patent it. If you want to be known for your idea, you can try to give it away, but you can also patent it and give it away. Anyways, I think the theme here is patent it.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
If this system is anything like a OTP, this means that the "very large digital key" would be exactly the same size as the data you're trying to protect... And if a USB memory key fob is large enough to store this "very large digital key", and safe enough to store the key to decrypting the important data you're trying to protect... Why not just store the important data on the USB memory key fob..
If we're already operating under the assumption that it's big enough and safe enough for the key, then storing the original data in the same place must also be secure. And, of course.. if this isn't secure, well.. then it's not a very smart place to store the key, now is it?
This a catch-22 type situation with creating an actual usable implementation of a OTP.. the key is the same size as the data you're trying to protect.. If you have a safe place to store the key, might as well just store the data there..(and if you have a safe way to communicate the key, you might as well just communicate the data)
And of course, the fact that the key is the same size as the data being protected, is what provides the OTP with it's unconditional security.. If the key isn't the same size as the data being protected.. well, then it must repeat, or use a key scheduler or something that would weaken the cipher towards cryptanalysis...
If this new algorithm really does have the unconditional security of a OTP, it probably has the same usability issues of a OTP... And if it doesn't.. it's probably not as secure as a OTP...
Want to release your revolutionary, unbreakable cipher? Here's what I would do if I were you:
Honestly, don't Slashdot editors know better than to post this kind of thing? If the submitter does not have at least these basic credentials, then he has not invented the Revolutionary New Totally Unbreakable Encryption Scheme. He has not found a way to make the one time pad reusable. In fact, hearing this statement alone is enough to disqualify the new secret algorithm. A re-used one time pad is not a one-time pad. Period. The end. Making this claim is the mathematical equivalent to announcing that you have discovered a revolutionary new perpetual motion machine or incantation for turning lead to gold.
Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)
Is he talking about GnuPG, or is he a cryptography genius who can't spell Pretty Good Privacy?
My website
He said it is "unbreakable" against brute-force attacks? Huh? You can't be unbreakable against brute-force attacks because brute-force is guaranteed to work, as long as you have enough time! Brute force means that you try every single possible key! What is he talking about? He also says that One-Time pads are vulnerable against known-plaintext attacks. Huh??? The whole point of one-time pads is that you do not have any known plaintext because it's a one-time pad!!! It's used once and then discarded!!! I have a feeling we're talking to an encryption rookie that really doesn't know what he's doing.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this.
A provisional patent costs $85, and you don't need a lawyer. It essentially keeps your patent claim alive for one year, and establishes a filing date, allowing you to disclose the invention without (as much) fear of losing your rights.
Once you assess it's commercial viability, you can decide on the >$10k formal patent.
I've done this many times. It's definitely the way to go.
Verify its value through academia and protect it with non disclosure agreements. If it is the rare case that it is of original "value", let the NSA know. They and their bretheren may even pay you to sit on it. Always let your intelligence agency know what you are doing. The alternative could be costly in unforeseeable ways.
Quote
Memo to the Amateur Cipher Designer
Congratulations. You've just invented this great new cipher, and you want to do something with it. You're new in the field; no one's heard of you, and you don't have any credentials as a cryptanalyst. You want to get well-known cryptographers to look at your work. What can you do?
Unfortunately, you have a tough road ahead of you. I see about two new cipher designs from amateur cryptographers every week. The odds of any of these ciphers being secure are slim. The odds of any of them being both secure and efficient are negligible. The odds of any of them being worth actual money are virtually non-existent.
Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis. And the only way to prove that is to subject the algorithm to years of analysis by the best cryptographers around.
"The best cryptographers around" break a lot of ciphers. The academic literature is littered with the carcasses of ciphers broken by their analyses. But they're a busy bunch; they don't have time to break everything. How do they decide what to look at?
Ideally, cryptographers should only look at ciphers that have a reasonable chance of being secure. And since anyone can create a cipher that he believes to be secure, this means that cryptographers should only look at ciphers created by people whose opinions are worth something. No one is impressed if a random person creates an cipher he can't break; but if one of the world's best cryptographers creates an cipher he can't break, now that's worth looking at.
The real world isn't that tidy. Cryptographers look at algorithms that are either interesting or are likely to yield publishable results. This means that they are going to look at algorithms by respected cryptographers, algorithms fielded in large public systems (e.g., cellular phones, pay-TV decoders, Microsoft products), and algorithms that are published in the academic literature. Algorithms posted to Internet newsgroups by unknowns won't get a second glance. Neither will patented but unpublished algorithms, or proprietary algorithms embedded in obscure products.
It's hard to get a cryptographic algorithm published. Most conferences and workshops won't accept designs from unknowns and without extensive analysis. This may seem unfair: unknowns can't get their ciphers published because they are unknowns, and hence no one will ever see their work. In reality, if the only "work" someone ever does is in design, then it's probably not worth publishing. Unknowns can become knowns by publishing cryptanalyses of existing ciphers; most conferences accept these papers.
When I started writing _Applied Cryptography_, I heard the maxim that the only good algorithm designers were people who spent years analyzing existing designs. The maxim made sense, and I believed it. Over the years, as I spend more time doing design and analysis, the truth of the maxim has gotten stronger and stronger. My work on the Twofish design has made me believe this even more strongly. The cipher's strength is not in its design; anyone could design something like that. The strength is in its analysis. We spent over 1000 man-hours analyzing Twofish, breaking simplified versions and variants, and studying modifications. And we could not have done that analysis, nor would we have had any confidence in that analysis, had not the entire design team had experience breaking many other algorithm designs.
A cryptographer friend tells the story of an amateur who kept bothering him with the cipher he invented. The cryptographer would break the cipher, the amateur would make a change to "fix" it, and the cryptographer would break it again. This exchange went on a few times until the cryptographer became fed up. When the amateur visited him to hear what the cryptographer thought, the cryptographer put three envelopes face down on the table. "In each of these envelopes is an attack against your cipher. Take one and read it. Don't come back until you've discovered the other two attacks." The amateur was never heard from again.
I don't mean to be completely negative. People occasionally design strong ciphers. Amateur cryptographers even design strong ciphers. But if you are not known to the cryptographic community, and you expect other cryptographers to look at your work, you have to do several things:
1. Describe your cipher using standard notation. This doesn't mean C code. There is established terminology in the literature. Learn it and use it; no one will learn your specialized terminology.
2. Compare your cipher with other designs. Most likely, it will use some ideas that have been used before. Reference them. This will make it easier for others to understand your work, and shows that you understand the literature.
3. Show why your cipher is immune against each of the major attacks known in literature. It is not good enough just to say that it is secure, you have to show why it is secure against these attacks. This requires, of course, that you not only have read the literature, but also understand it. Expect this process to take months, and result in a large heavily mathematical document. And remember, statistical tests are not very meaningful.
4. Explain why your cipher is better than existing alternatives. It makes no sense to look at something new unless it has clear advantages over the old stuff. Is it faster on Pentiums? Smaller in hardware? What? I have frequently said that, given enough rounds, pretty much anything is secure. Your design needs to have significant performance advantages. And "it can't be broken" is not an advantage; it's a prerequisite.
5. Publish the cipher. Experience shows that ciphers that are not published are most often very weak. Keeping the cipher secret does not improve the security once the cipher is widely used, so if your cipher has to be kept secret to be secure, it is useless anyway.
6. Don't patent the cipher. You can't make money selling a cipher. There are just too many good free ones. Everyone who submitted a cipher to the AES is willing to just give it away; many of the submissions are already in the public domain. If you patent your design, everyone will just use something else. And no one will analyze it for you (unless you pay them); why should they work for you for free?
7. Be patient. There are a lot of algorithms to look at right now. The AES competition has given cryptographers 15 new designs to analyze, and we have to pick a winner by Spring 2000. Any good cryptographer with spare time is poking at those designs.
If you want to design algorithms, start by breaking the ones out there. Practice by breaking algorithms that have already been broken (without peeking at the answers). Break something no one else has broken. Break another. Get your breaks published. When you have established yourself as someone who can break algorithms, then you can start designing new algorithms. Before then, no one will take you seriously.
Creating a cipher is easy. Analyzing it is hard.
See "Self-Study Course in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis": http://www.counterpane.com/self-study.html
A) Patenting requires a few thousand dollars easily. Questionable value if what you have turns out to be valueless.
B) The fundimental building blocks for crypto these days are all patent free: You have free hashes, free block cyphers (AES), free public key (RSA). There is no reason for someone theses days to choose a patent-entangled encryption primitive.
C) A one time pad is not vulnerable to known plaintext. I don't know what the poster is talking about. Since one time pads are never reused, the known plaintext tells NO information about the rest of the pad.
D) For the US, you can publish THEN patent, you do have a year between when there is a public disclosure and when you can patent it. This does NOT apply to non-US patents. But since the US is at least half the market, who cares about the rest?
D is really critical, because the post does raise many "snake oil" warning flags. If it's NOT snake oil, he can disclose it and patent it after people at least get a look at it. If it IS snake-oil, then it can be shot down before spending the k$s needed to patent it.
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A commercial? What a gip!
The intersection of the sets {AOL users, guys named Kip, actual inventors} is null.
Even though you have not revealed your algorithm, you have revealed a sufficient imprecision in your understanding of cryptography to have a useful patent.
As pointed out by others, your implication that one-time pad can be broken with 'known plaintext' implies you don't know what a one-time pad is.
Also, you claim you have a 'very large key'. If your algorithm uses a key that is as large as the data being encrypted, then in fact, it is itself a form of one-time pad..right up until you use a key-bit more than once where it necessarily becomes attackable.
You really need to consult a cryptologist about your algorithm before you waste any money on the patent. Many people before you have fallen into the trap of patenting 'unbreakable encryption' which is not.
So that no one could use it? Or so that no one can use it? why in the hell would I use your patented, untested algorithm with all of the unpatented, tested algorithms that I have to choose from?
Plus, what you are suggesting is impossable and sounds more like a press release than a working algorithm. How do you know it is actually what you think it is until people get a crack at it? Sounds like BS to me.
.
Show us (well him) the code!
If I sell a car that doesn't work, I still have made moeny. If it was more than I had in the car, or more than the car was worth to me, I have made a profit.
If I sell an idea, it doesn't matter if it was cracked in 30 seconds, I already have the money in hand.
SELL = PROFIT
(with the possible exception of liquidation sales or terrible math skills, which don't really apply here)
surley if he puts a patent on it it will be subject to US export laws. This means that under developed and anti-western countries (seen from the US perspective) will fall short of being able to obtain this new software. Also somebody will craack the encryption eventually, either by Quantum computing methods, very hravy brute force or by some new other means (which as yet to be discovered). However making it open-source will ensure that it is not only tested to the limits, it can also be improved at a quicker and more useful way. physman
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
As soon as I saw the USB memory "key" devices on the market I was thinking about modfying PGP to accept a very large key. I would store the public
key on the server and the private key in the little
device.
Having been through this already I can tell you that patents are only worth the paper they are printed on if you do not have the financial means to enforce them.
If you think you have something truly unique, copyright it, protect yourself in all the cheap ways possible (get it documented through a lawyer to establish the date and scope of your invention), and then shop it around to various manufacturers/companies until you can find a partner who is both interested and has the financial means to establish and enforce the patent and market the products.
My neighbor did exactly this. He invented a new paint process (hardware and workflow) which allowed car parts to be processed much quicker than was previously being done. He found an equipment manufacturer to work with who paid for the patents, developed the products and is currently paying him royalties to the tune of $250K annually. He still has his day job and he is making a reasonable income to boot.
The bottom line is that if you think $20K is expensive for filing the patent you have no idea what hell you will go through to try and enforce it. Our legal bills were on average $350K per month to try and enforce our patents and in the end (after $3M) we just barely won our case and only because of a technicality. Moral: $3M for some companies is peanuts to spend to try and win the rights to manufacture a product or leverage an important technology. It could be as little as several months worth of R&D expense to them. Even though we had the patents we almost lost the fight in the long run because we did not have deep enough pockets to weather the storm of patent litigation.
OTP is not vulnerable to known plaintext attacks -- unless you use the pad more than once which you should never, ever do.
:)
So many people claim to come up with their own OTP replacements that they aren't worth counting.
If you really have a patentable invention, patent it. If you later decide you want to let someone create an open source implementation you can always grant them a license.
But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for this
Where does the vegetarian pirana fit in to the algorithm?
Best Slashdot Co
Paying a royalty every time i s(h)it doesn't seem to pleasant to me.
It's pretty clear that in today's world, prior art doesn't matter.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
Read the FAQs in the crypto newsgroups. This claim of yours set off every bullshit detector I've got.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Create a little tune and lyrically read your patent submission, any source code, and detailed description of your technology. Then the MPAA's actions will cover you. ROT-13 it and the DMCA will also cover you especially if you also distribute decoder rings with your developer's package (pricing and availability not specified at press time)
If you haven't already, you should talk to a patent lawyer before you talk to anyone else. The lawyer will advise you on what to do, and, more importantly, what *not* to do.
;-) hand it over to the government before they raid your house, take it from you, and you mysteriously disappear. Did I say that? Sorry. ;-)
As someone else mentioned, you should also talk to a crytographer, and get a non-disclosure agreement (again, talk to the lawyer).
Then it is up to you, your lawyer, and the cryptanalyst to do a cost-benefit analysis. If you think you can make more money with the $20,000 for the patent (possibly more when you hire the cryptanalyst), then do it. If not, say, if there are some serious security/practicality drawbacks, you may think about publishing it open source, and have your 15minutes of fame in the open source community.
Or, if it is really great and "unbreakable"
Patent it for the financial potential. People in other countries (And probably your own.) will release open-source knockoffs that start with "Gnu," "K," and "G" anyway, and eventually will find a workaround or prior art somewhere.
The "Large key" would need a "Large Algorithm"
since NOTHING is safe from a BRUTE FORCE ATTACK!
I just read this dudes email again.. and man, way off. A large key only buys you time, that's it.
No matter what the scheme, it can eventually be cracked.
The new project of everyone's favorite sci.math crank James Harris.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but a true one time pad is 100% unbreakable. There is no attack that can get even one bit of the message.
I don't understand your "Plug in "World Trade Center" step. Even if you match the part of the text that says "Word Trade Center" all you'll be doing is
P XOR P XOR C
where P is the message and C is ciphertext. all you'll end up with is a bunch of garbage, and a small section of the key.
This doesn't reveal anything. I think you have the OTP confused with a Vignere cipher (can't check spelling ATM)
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I seriously doubt you've found anything substantial that some of the worlds greatest mathematical minds just sort of 'passed over'. I mean, seriously. It's been proven that the only secure encryption technique is OTP. You could no more have come up with something more secure then I could add 2 + 2 and end up with 64,000.
Finally, you can actually both "give it to the world" and "make money". In fact, the whole point of the patent system is to get people to give out their secrets by granting them a limited monopoly.
If you really have something worth while, you can simply license you're concepts for general use. Public Key crypto has been patented for 30 years (almost expired) but it's used everywhere and has been a great boon to secure communications. Why? Because the authors licensed it for reasonable rates and allowed it to be used for free.
Patents only cost about $700, and once you get one it's yours for the next N years (or whatever, not sure about the exact number of years, it may be different in different fields). You can still let people use it for N-1 years and then try to get money out of it in year N (see the Unisys GIF patent). Patents aren't like trademarks where you have to keep policing them or you lose them, despite what morons on Slashdot (such as Hemos, even... btw whatever happened to him?) seem to believe.
One other thing:
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
If I'm reading this right, you seem to think OTP is susceptible to brute force attacks. If this is true, you basically know jack about encryption.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Nobody has mentioned this yet here. Get a domain with the name of the invention, and secure a paypal e-mail at that domain. Post it publicly with a date stamp to newsgroups so nobody else can claim to have brought it out first. If people like it, they will donate.
And all the morons who say to patent it should be killed immediately for holding back society. Their deaths will help advance technology, and as such they are useless. If any of you are feeling sad or frustrated at your lack of ability to get money, please kill yourself. Check with the Church of Euthanasia
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP). The disadvantage is carrying around a very large digital key (which could easily fit on one of those USB memory key fobs).
This sounds just like the dozens of crypto products that Bruce Schneier routinely pokes fun of in his cryptogram newsletters on www.counterpane.com
Now, the real reason why this is bogus is that OTPs require a key of the same length as the original message. If you can securely transmit a key as large as the orignal file then why didn't you just transmit the original message via the same mechanism? The whole reason people spend years developing encryption such as AES/DES/RSA is to keep the key length short for any arbitrary length message. The shorter his "many time pad" is or the more it repeats the weaker it becomes. The whole strength behind the OTP is the randomness of the encrypted result, something lost if a short pad is used over and over again. His scheme may be novel but is more than likely not at all secure and practical at the same time.
.yrassecen tentap oN
The idea of the monster encryption key in a fob isn't terribly new - and it's a major security risk for a couple of reasons. One, you can lose the thing and you're screwed. Another is that someone can steal it and you're screwed. The courier idea is very high security as long as you have guards and guns and that sort of thing.
Keep thinking, maybe you'll figure something out that'll fix it...
Friends,
I recently took a course from my employer's patent lawyers. They explained what the patent system is about when you might want to use it.
The reason that countries set up patents is to protect investments and to share discoveries. Prior to taking my course, I thought that the patent system was solely for the first reason. However, if you don't share the details of your discovery you can always keep it as a trade secret.
The idea behind sharing it (getting a patent) is this.
1) You are granted a 20 year monopoly on the idea.
2) Other people are free to look at the details of your idea and improve on it.
It's that second point that makes the patent system valuable. If you just sell your idea/product without getting a patent then you're not helping the rest of the world. If you get a patent, I'm free to look at what you did and improve on it. (Ok, open source is even more free that way but it doesn't help you make money with a 20 year monopoly on your idea.)
The other option is a trade secret. If you can't easily detect how your competitor is doing "their thing" then your patent isn't really enforceable anyway. Rather than sharing your secret via a patent you might just keep it to yourself and copywrite your code.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
OTP provides perfect secrecy. It doesn't provide any form of authentication, or even hint at a way to provide authentication. If someone knows the message, they can figure out the key, and they can send whatever message they like in its place.
When I wanted to learn more about cryptography, I started from what I understood (OTP) and came up with some ideas for fixing its limitations. I wrote up a page describing the new method (One Time Deck), and put up links to cryptography newsgroups for comment. Sure enough, they pointed out some superior methods (my method works, it's just stupidly expensive in key data). I added links to papers on the superior methods to my page, and moved on.
All in all, time well spent in gaining a thorough understanding of theoretically perfect non-quantum cryptocgraphic methods. It may be taken for granted that all worthwhile OTP variants have been covered. In cryptography, theoretical perfection is as simple and boring as basic arithmetic, while practicality is as complex and rich as computer programming.
The inventor would be well-advised to follow my approach, and at least learn something. Unless he intends to swindle other people who understand even less than he does... that has traditionally been the most profitable use for bad ideas in cryptography.
... name the algorithm threefish, then sell the patent and name to Microsoft, then watch Counterpane sue them and then read Bruce add another reason to hate Microsoft security on Crypto-Gram, like he does every other issue.
Encryption is the ability to spread a limited source of entropy over a broad amount of data. The One Time Pad simply recognizes that if you have equal amounts of entropy and data then you don't need a very good mixing algorithm; just XOR the data with the pad and voila, the data becomes unreadable.
The challenge of good algorithms is to limit the amount of entropy needed to generate unreadable text to as small a size as possible. Typical algorithms in use today will by changing a single bit in the key, ultimately flip about 50% of the encrypted output. Half of the bits is optimum. Fewer and your entropy isn't getting mixed in very well. More and your bit is just inverting the data.
If you really want to contribute to the world of cryptography, don't bother with encryption algorithms. The ones we have are quite good. Honestly. Instead you should try to figure out a new use for the basic operations in cryptography. We know how to protect content, add signatures, authenticate content, and do non-repudiation. We can encrypt for a small number of readers each with his own key, or for broadcast, we can build webs of trust, and hierarchies. Come up with a new use that makes as much business sense as digital signatures and you'll have something worth patenting.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
Claiming it was not susceptible to a known plaintext attack and that it was a style of pad that could be used many times is ludicrous on its face.
Judging from the limited clues in the post, this is my guess as to what he did:
....
1) Generate a huge OTP.
2) Write an algorithm that takes a password, and based on that password select a subset of the OTP. This can be done via some sort of formula that hashes a password to a set of numbers which can be used as indices+offsets into the OTP
3) Encrypt the data with the subset of the OTP
4) To decrypt the data, you would then need to use the OTP, plus the password to select the subset of the OTP that was used in the encryption step.
And this, technically turns your OTP into a MTP.
Any takers?
I recommend writing your 3d animation program before trying to patent this encryption scheme...
Then when you they break it at least you will get some pr instead of being empty handed..
You have several key assumptins in your submission that completely backwards in the field of cyptology..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
There is no point paying $20,000 and discovering that your algorithm is flawed. Good science (i.e. establishing that your method does indeed do what you think) needs peer review -- you need people to act as Devil's advocates.
But putting your algorithm in the public domain does not mean that you can't make money from it. There is money to be made in consulting services -- and you will know your algorithm better than anyone. If your algorithm is what you say it is, there will be banks and online stores that may be willing to pay good money for you to consult on encryption.
One of the movements that seems to be picking up speed is the 'open' culture -- who trusts an OS to which the source code is closed, who trusts an algorithm that no one has really tested?
My gut feeling is that your algorithm is flawed -- most of these things have holes or other significant disadvantages. You won't see them because this is your "baby". But you need other people to test if your method is flawed.
In any case, it's unlikely that you can sell the farm and put your feet up. You'll need to keep working in some way, and if encryption is your thing, why not work in that sector?
The best thing to do is seek professional advice. See if there are business incubation initiatives or a VC culture in your area and speak to them, but remember to play your cards close to your chest until you are sure where you stand. Read about other encryption algorithms, who invented them, what they are doing now etc.
In any case, good luck.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
The problem is that your invention is worthless. One-time-pads are ridiculously easy to come up with and a many-time-pad could be done just as well with many one-time-pads stored on the same media.
If your invention only has 1 pad stored, then when the first pad is used, the rest of them become compromized, since a translation can be made between the first pad and the next. Even if the means of translating between the two requires some other form of encryption, the system is only as strong as its weakest link and thus the one-time-pad is now an RSA scheme.
What makes a one-time-pad the only form of unbreakable encryption is the fact that it is so lead-pipe simple, but this same simplicity makes it impossible to improve upon.
I would also suggest you hire a patent lawyer to search for similar devices...with stuff like this, there's a good chance that somebody's done it already.
This guy is describing the correct attack... against the wrong algorithm....
He is describing how you crack a replacement cryptographic system.
The way this system works is, you take a letter in your alphabet, say E and always replace Es with Rs.
When you "plug in" a peice of text, for instace "world trade center" to a piece of cipher text, you are saying (if the cipher text begins with x)... "ok, I'm going to see what happens when I tell all Xs to become Ws.
In this way, the rest of the text can "fall out" in the way he described. This is because, when you make one replacement that replacement is continued throughout the rest of the doccuemtn. This means there is a pattern, and patterns are the enemy of cryptography.
In a one time pad, there is no pattern. This is because the replacement scheme is different for every letter. This means, even if you "plug in" World Trade Center, it doesn't tell you anything about the rest of the text, because no pattern holds for the rest of the text
The parent text is describing the cracking of a system other than one time pad. This illustrates a fundamental problem with cryptography, that many people are pointing out in this article... it is tough to tell when someone makes a claim, if they know just what the hell they're talking about.
---Lane
I'm 99.99 percent sure this is snake oil. A many time pad cannot be as secure as a randomly created, one time pad.
That, and he an AOL address. nuff said...
Um, XOR or modulo addition are usualy used in the final stage to actualy encrypt things, after you've done all the math.
Also, if you only use your large random digit file once it is perfictly secure. The more you use it, the weaker it gets.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sounds very much like the usual snake oil to me, especially as the one-time pad cannot be improved. The concept itself just does not allow any improvement.
However there are numerous "improvements" out there that have serious flaws and are often claimed to be "as unbreakable as one-time pads" but without the limitation of using the pad only once or such things.
If that is the case here as well (which I strongly suspect), patent it. It will blend right in with all the other low-quality patents....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
You forgot to add:
P.S.
I am not a crackpot
to your story submission.
1) Patent it! Most absolutely.
:P
2) Start marketing it to companies such as IBM, Sony, CISCO, Sun, etc. (Avoid MS!) Give stipulations that limit what they are legally allowed to impliment with it, so that they do not overstep your personal investments*
3) At the same time, start up a company of your own which would capitolize on this encryption process and provide products and services that impliment it
4) Release full implimentation use rights to the Open Source community
* these personal investments, being your own company, which you're starting at the same time. Possibly establish the company first, so you have some sort of credibility?
If all goes well, your company startup would have a corner on the encryption market in the same fashion that CISCO has on the router market. You'd be the end-all of the situation. Large distributors, security companies, and pretty much everyone else would come to you for solutions.
Don't write yourself out of the picture by selling rights to a company. If what you have is truely an unbreakable encryption scheme, you've got the holy grail of computing. Even a percentage share of profits wouldn't even be substantial enough, IMO, because you wouldn't have a say in how things work.
Get a couple loans and get started.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Dimple monkey twice the pudding octopi for tango man. Very blender shoe, cellular, scooter my daisy heads. Diddley day.
If he makes some kind of claim that it has relevance to DRM... well, then, he's set.
I advise that he not only patent it, but work on an implementation for securing some sort of digital media with it, whether it actually works or not.
Even if it's pure garbage, it won't be the first time, and he'll still have his advance money.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It sounds a lot like a classic blunder, and not a new encryption at all.
.sig
But assuming for the moment that one discovers a new kind of encryption,
the question becomes why is this new encryption better than the hundreds of existing algorithms.
Rijndael is libre, approved by FIPS, has reference implementations available,
and has been thoroughly checked by several cryptographers.
If the only difference your encryption scheme has is a (possibly flawed) proof of security,
then you have a "me too" product that's competing in saturated market place.
You best bet is probably to go for fame, and then try to turn that fame into a better paying job.
-- this is not a
Using a proven random number generator, create a random number of adequate size (perhaps 8 million binary digits - equal to approx. 1Mbyte which can be easily stored in a USB memory key fob). Using a bit count offset into the random number and perhaps a mask (indicating number of bits to use and/or skip). Offset and/or mask can be randomly chosen or taken from some widely available source such as today's lottery number for the offset plus the closing S&P for the mask.
Encrypt using the large random number, the offset and the mask.
Decrypting can be easily accomplished by anyone who has access to the large random number plus your offset and mask values.
Repeat as necessary by varying offset and mask.
1. If YOU feel it's good, apply for a Patent.
2. Have a lawyer draft you a solid NDA, then shop it around and get a company to back you.
This article is about a variation on a OTP, "improving it" to being a multi-use pad. Such "improvements" are the type of thing such as what the prior poster mentioned : Something like "shift the bits in the otherwise one time key by the sum of the encrypted document...and then store the shift count in the final word...".
I'm not going to jail for you, or you, or anybody!
I could use it to hide my pr0n from my spousal unit.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
By holding back technology, they are endangering us from getting killed by some other country (or planet) that has better technology. So why not kill supporters of intellectual property (like most of the repliers to this story)? Make it like blasphemy laws in Islamic states. Mohammed was a deluded fool. I support a shorter copyright term. Both get you killed.
Dude, you are totaly wrong.
Remember, in OTP the pad is the same length as the message. So if you plugged "World Trade Center" in at every point, you wouldn't have anything but garbaltygook for the rest of the message. The only way you can get the key to reveal itself is if you have the entire original message. And if you have the entire message what's the point of getting the pad, since it'll never be used again?
Also, because the pad should be random, there is no way to tell if you've gotten a valid result for a piece of text. So in other words, every single message of the right length could possibly be the actual message.
Someone please mod the above post back down.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Don't listen to anything these open source hippies say. patent that fucker!
This article from Bruce Schneier contains the advice you are looking for:
l #c ipherdesign
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-9810.htm
"I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. "
I don'tknow if the world is ready for 'suppository based encryption'
The problem is OTPs are not - I repeat not - susceptible to brute force attacks.
I can't believe that someone who made this basic incorrect assumption about encryption would be able to come up with something better than the OTP, sorry.
I'm sure he can patent it, but I doubt he'll be able to sell it, because he's a complete moron who dosn't know what he's talking about at all.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...Now all we need to do is combine this Infinate One Time Pad idea with the Infinate Compression Algoritm and well have an Infinate amount of Libraries Of Congress stored securly in only obe bit!
Wow!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
That would be the best encryption you can have. The one only you know about.
The best encryption you can have is OTP. The next best encryption you can have is AES or some of the other advanced encryption methods that are known to be mathematically secure.
Just because you don't know how something was encrypted doesn't mean you can't figure it out if it wasn't done well. And given the fact that this guy thinks OTP is susceptible to plaintext attacks, I would put good money on the fact that anything encrypted with this method would not be done well.
In fact, if you do know the method, cryptanalysis isn't half as much fun.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What you are suggesting has been done since the 70's at least.
Various entities create one-time pads based on cosmic waves or the behavior of radioactive items. They then produce a large pad and then re-use for a specified number of times by manipulating it with various algorithims. The algorithms are sent in a seperate one-time pad.
All of the major ideas in encyrption have existed for decades or centuries. Future advances will come algorithms that deliver degrees of randomness. Future flaws encyptions will come from subtle errors in those algorithims.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Funniest. Post. Ever.
You can sell software, but not algorithms.
It is a bad way to patent algorithms, because
You prevent everyone from studying and improving
this algorithm.
I am perhaps not smart enough for my own algorithm,
but I am sure, I would give it to my university to
allow them to work on it.
And 2nd thing is that inventing something doesn't
mean that someone else cannot invent the same
thing either! What do You want? Force him to stop
thinking?
Personally, I have been thinking about this a lot lately too -- for encryption and other software that I am writing.
/. article), and the reason why we never see some kewl gadget that existed when our parents were kids. Look at OLED -- much better than LCD, cheaper to make, etc -- but CRT/LCD manufacturers loose money if they are mass produced.
I believe that the Patent office (and Copyright Law) are outdated and prevent the growth of technology. Why? Because the way it should work is that you design this new encryption, and it gets utilitized EVERYWHERE making everything better. Instead, what normally happens is that people patent things and it gets blocked from the public (either by the inventor, or the one he sells out to). This is part of the reason that medicines cost more than they should (see previous
Besides, someone could probably outdo your patent by adding the words "using binary" since the Patent Office is obviously NOT doing its job correctly (regarding tech/software/hardware).
But, how to make a living if it is OpenIP? If it is a "good" technology, then $5 registration or something MIGHT happen. However, if it is a "great" technology, perhaps by teaching -- ie: classes, books (O'Reilly, et al), etc... Try emailing O'Reilly and seeing if they would be interested in publishing a book on how it works if you write it.
One thing that I personally am very careful of, and most people on this list will probably flame me for it, is I wouldn't use GPL. GPL is like a virus, and you loose the ability to get the whole world to use it. Most companies I have worked for were more than willing to use BSD-based code, but wouldn't even look at GPL-code... So, if you want the whole world to use it, GPL will loose half your audience. If you don't care about it being used by the masses, then it might protect you more (I am not convinced on that matter due to 'cygwin').
Malachi
BTW: I thank **ALL** encryption can be brute-forced.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Share a OTP of 2^24 bits. Send 256 messages of 2^16 bits at different offsets into the OTP. An unbreakable "many time" pad. Wow! Incredible! Amazing! I'm going to patent this and make a bazillion dollars and never have to work again!
"(and the $20,000 to patent it)"
You can patent it yourself. If you are smart enough to make a new form of encryption, you are smart enough to learn the patent law and procedures. See the book Patent It Yourself.
After a trip to the Washington, D.C. U.S. Patent and Trademark office, I found that the patent procedure was as corrupt as the people who make money from it could make it. However, you can do it yourself even though there are many people who work in the patent industry who will try to stand in your way.
The patent examiners themselves, who work for the U.S. government, are quite friendly and helpful, I found. That's a very good thing. I'm proud of the U.S. government for its personal, friendly service, which I've found is quite common.
Another idea is to prepare the patent yourself and have an honest attorney (if you can find one) look at it and make comments for improvement. It's a lot of work to prepare everything yourself, but it is a lot of work supervising an attorney, too. If my experience is any guide, patent attorneys will try to steal as much as possible, while being somewhat disinterested in the exact technology of your claims.
There is a huge, huge problem in the United States with lawyers being dishonest. Something should be done about this. I guess the dishonesty goes along with all the other corruption, such as wanting war so that the rich people that own weapons manufacturing companies can get richer: What should be the Response to Violence? . The present U.S. President George W. Bush was arrested once for drunk driving, and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was arrested twice for drunk driving. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was the child of alcoholics. If you know the culture of alcoholics, you know that both presidents show plenty of evidence in their personalities of their involvement with alchohol. (Yes, Clinton abused sexuality, but Clinton was intellectually capable of being president.) My family has no experience with alcoholism, but in researching the (unfinished) book I've talked with many alcoholics who say that it usually requires several years of drunk driving before you get so relaxed with drunkenness that you get arrested while driving. There is a huge, huge leadership shortage in the United States. The best leaders in the U.S. are two men who have been arrested for a serious crime a total of three times? That's a shortage of leadership.
Anyhow, patenting something requires personal attention from you. It is not like buying a car; you cannot pay and walk away. You need to be very knowledgeable about the construction of claims. If you know that, and you can express yourself well in writing, it is not difficult to prepare all the documents. However, it is a lot of work.
Encrypt it and post it to the internet. You'll know if you did a good job when nobody can break it. :-)
-DCookie
My SIG is a SG-552 Commando
It was my understanding that you could backdate a patent by up to a year, and that publications by the original author during that one year period were not considered prior art.
I'd check with a lawyer first, but what I would do is publish, wait to see if I get humilated as the flaws are exposed, and then start filing in a few months. U.S. Patent law only concerns itself with who first invented, not who first filed.
A key at least as long as the message? Come on, years ago I used project gutenberg texts as keys. You agree on numbers for specific texts, then, the key given is textnumber:byte offset. Offset the ascii codes of the printable characters ascii codes at the lowest one (32?), for the key string, add that to each character, wrapping back down to the bottom. Obviously, knowing what the keys come from, a brute-force dictionary attack could do it, but if you use your own secret keys, maybe encrypt one page with another at some offset, or watch a lava lamp with a webcam for a day, saving each frame, and checksum them), and protect them, you're unbreakable.
Now, what I find fascinating is the assymetric keys, where you can give somebody a key to encrypt that can't be used to decrypt.
Anyway, my point: if your idea is nothing more than a full-length secret key, don't worry about export rules or patenting it. Anybody who didn't already think of it has nothing worth encrypting anyway.
Check with a patent lawyer, you have a certain amount of time between the first public disclosure of an invention and when you have to file the patent -- at least in the U.S. The same does not hold true for international patent law. However, unless you are *REALLY* greedy an unbreakable algorithm such as yours would be worth more than enough money in the US market.
;-)
Second, in the US, there's a thing called a "provisional" patent application. It's notes or a paper describing the invention that is filed with the patent office as a placeholder for the real application. Be careful here. Talk to a real patent lawyer.
So here's what I'd do:
1) Prepare a paper on your invention
2) Work with a patent attorney to file the paper as a provisional patent application -- should take very little time and money
3) Submit the paper for peer review
4) If the paper survives, amend the provisional application, and you're on your way
It's important to note that by following this plan you retain rights in the US but may be out of luck in other jurisdictions.
Oh, one last bit of advice, never follow any advice given by a Slashdot reader.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
It might actually be easier to break the encryption by just stealing your memory card or whatever.
At least (using conventional encryption methods) if you use a large enough key, brute force won't be a practical attack since the info protected is probably somewhat time sensitive (say to at least 100 years or so)...
Nevertheless, what worked well in WWII could find a practical use in todays world.
Troy
Man, y'all are working too hard. First thing *I* do with it is encrypt the hell outta my pr0n. :-)
All symmetric ciphers with fixed-length keys could also be called "many-time pads". The converse is also true. So what you've basically done is to create a new symmetric-key cipher; and frankly I have my doubts that it is as good as you say.
Let's assume for a second that you have actually come up with a good one that is worth patenting and that you value the work of the free software community.
You say that you want to patent it to "feed your family", but everyone knows that if you are successful with this you will become a millionaire or better. That is like saying you want a stick of dynamite so you can kill a spider. An alternative, if you value the community, is to release the algorithm for free and continue working for your money. If you are as smart as you think you are, it shouldn't be hard to feed your family.
If this is true then perhaps there might be some merit to his claims of his crypto being as fantastic as he claims, but only some...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
>those USB memory key fobs). My question is this: Could I sell enough .dot bombs did are over.
>$10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years
>of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" While the claims
>
>
No one in their right mind would pay you $.10 for some idiotic shareware GPG extensions like you're peddling. Too bad the days when scam artists you could con a dumb-ass VC out of their money like so many of the
Give it away.
Let everyone look at it.
Update your resume with your accomplishment.
Get a job.
10 to 1, there is a huge hole in the idea.
Erm, more like infinity to one...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And there's no way to "improve upon OTP by turning it into a 'Many Time Pad'". You use an OTP more than once and its absolutely worthless:
CypherText1 = ClearText1 XOR Key
ClearText1 = CypherText1 XOR Key
If the key is reused, we can take CypherText1 (which is really ClearText1 XOR key) and XOR it to the original known text and get the key.
The only conceiveable way to turn an OTP into a many time pad would be to only use a segment of the pad once. Probably this is why he wanted to make the pad so big - so it could continue to be used for a while until the pad has been used up. Big deal. That is no different from standard OTP and the same results would be obtained simply by generating a new OTP every time something needed to be encrypted.
Now, I am far from an expert in cryptography - and programming an OTP is as far as I've ever gotten. But even to me this story looks very amateurish.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I'd take my new form of encryption, and think of a great message that people might want to hear for some reason. Then I'd take that message and use my encryption method to seal it off. Then I'd post the encrypted message and see if anyone out there could figure out what I was saying. Then I'd sit back and do something other than hiding my shit to make my money. Pardon the expletive, I'm a fan of the 4 letter words.
This is an absolutely factless yabbering by some smug asshole who apparently can't even read the article (which isn't about a OTP) and it gets moderated insightful? Where's the insight? That he's an arrogant fuck?
I don't think you understand why a one-time pad is called a *one-time* pad -- once you start re-using digits, you forgo the unbreakability guarantee. The fact that you re-use them in a funny order surely improves the scheme's security, but you don't have any way of determing how much. You can only guess at how secure your scheme is. I would suggest using a block cipher whose cryptographic properties are well-understood, such as 3DES or Rijndael/AES. It would be faster, easier, and probably more secure.
A friend of mine at uni wrote an encryption code that xor'd every byte of information you wanted to encrypt with a different random key... he thought it was pretty cool but at the end of the day all encryption is breakable and anyone who thinks VPNs are sercure needs their head examined. Should you patent it ? Yes if you want to waste your money. Would anyone buy it ? Why when we've got perfectly good open encryption algorithms that are widely used i.e SSL and SSH.
1. I would treat it very kindly and with respect. Not like that last son of a bitch encryption that slept with my best friend.
2. Not make the same mistake of thinking that PGP stands for "Pope's Godlike Privacy"
...next they're coming after the lowest form of life on Earth: helpless technologists that fear and despise lawyers.
Take it from an independent analyst. I was given an "unbreakable, re-usable, OTP-like cipher" that had "public-key properties" and was "mathematically unbreakable" to peruse once. I was the independent, NDA-ed, competent cryptologist of the story.
Long story short, the algorithm broke in five minutes. Badly. The designer revised the algorithm. I broke it in ten minutes. We repeated the process a number of times, and it never took longer than about half an hour to flesh out an attack on the algorithm (and not just theoretical attacks, either).
The inventor of the algorithm wouldn't have it, though. The algorithm was secure. He told me that none of my attacks were practical; I wrote programs that demonstrated the attack in mere seconds. He finally told me that I was rigging the attack demos, that I was just jealous for not having thought of it first, and that he was going ahead with using the algorithm in his product.
Moral of the story? Crackpots won't listen to reason. Hire anybody you want; if you won't listen to them, you're just wasting your goddamn money.
The very instant Microsoft shows any interest in it, open it up and give it away to the public. Better that it's in the hands of everybody than have it become the proprietary software of a corporate megalith.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
Is it just me, or does it seem strange to ask the slashdot community what course of action one should take in what seems to be a personal dilemma? What's to be gained from this data? Esentially it's a voting question, would you do A or B? I'll pick the highest moderated A or B to do? Granted some folks have mentioned a couple things that should be noted (but also should be obvious) about obtaining a patent first and licensing as such to let the open source community use it, and commerical entities pay for it. I know this is going to sound very flamebait-ish, especially coming from an AC, but it seems to me the intent of the poster was to sit down for an ego feast, not to ask folks to make up his/her mind for them.
I have been using the Comscire Random Number Generator (which uses Johnson Noise from a resistor to generate the numbers) to build 512 byte pads onto a flash device for a cryptrographic application I sell to customers who need VERY secure communications. As long as the flashdevice is not physically compromised, this method is secure and unbreakable. The key is to have two machines on each side, one of which allows the user to create the plaintext and then encrypts it and a totally seperate machine that is connected to the Internet. The encrypted text is transferred to the Internet-connected PC via a CDR. That way the machine which has the plaintext and ciphertext copies is never connected to the net. Pads are selected via a pre-arranged mechanism.
...despite the fact that nine out of ten slashdotters constantly complain about abuse of the patent system, almost every top-rated comment in this thread recommends that the submitter patent first and decide whether or not to extort later. What's even lamer is that each of those posts includes the obligatory bigotry about lawyers. You people are fucking pathetic.
So you have a cryptosystem. What value does it have if nobody trusts it? Who would use it? What are they risking? Lots of smart people need to establish a scientific consensus on the difficulty of a theoretical crack.
The value of a cryptosystem is shared, therefore, by the cryptographer and the community of cryptanalysts who establish its trustworthiness. Since the cryptanalysts have to do more work establishing the new system, you need to buy them out.
I suggest you patent it, and then seek a DoD contract. If that fails, sell shareware (good luck). You're going to do MUCH more work defending your system with mathematical proofs than you had to do to concieve and implement it for yourself. Go on the lecture circut for a little cash. Phil Zimmerman did...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Lets say that you have a really good idea.
Sorry for being a bit negative, but Im really just relistic. Lots of thing can go wrong:
* Someone might find a fault in your algoritms after several years
* Someone might come up with (royalty free) methods of getting the same level of security (not related to your patent)
I dont know your idea, but speaking on a general basis, even if your idea goes through the first review from the nets security gurus, you still just have 1:10 odds of getting you 20K back.
If you havent spent a lot of resources on it already (just your spare time for a couple of years?), I would seriously consider open sourcing it. Remember however (important!): Use your own name for the algoritm.
If it turns out to not be such a good idea after all, you still have your 20K.
If it turns out to be an OK idea, it is a better chance for it to succeed if its open.
If it is an brilliant idea, you want get rich right away, but when everybody is talking about the fantastic "Kip Knight"-algorithm, the $20 your getting from shareware licenses wont matter. You can walk into most security companies in the world, and set your own sallary.
I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. I would obviously like to feed my family on the fruits of my endeavour but don't see much hope in the open source route. My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
/absolutely/ /nessecary/.
This implies a misunderstanding of the notion of a one-time pad. The significance of a one-time pad is that it *cannot* be broken, even by brute force, because the key is of at least the length of the document, and because the key is not stored or regeneratable. There is no way to reconstitute the document, because in a one-time pad, the document could be anything underneath.
Consider the simple case of modulo-addition crypto. Take a source and a key, both of length N. Add the values of each stream's position [i] together. If the sum exceeds the radix of storage, store the sum modulo storage's radix (generally, 256, the size of a byte.) On decrypt, if subtracting the key position drops a value below 0, add the storage's radix (basically, de-modulo on demand), and you're golden.
Though that's not particularly difficult to crack, given a repeating key (when the source stream exceeds the key stream's length, it is common to simply loop the key stream), in a one-time pad this cannot be broken. Why? Because that sum you have could represent *any* character, because the key's value could be the other summand. Therefore, a message of length 13 could be:
"hello, world!"
"bomb the cars"
"chocolate bar"
"steven wright"
You'll note that it's fairly easy to derive a key which gives the encrypted stream "AAAAAAAAAAAAA" for each of those. This is why a one-time pad cannot be broken: there's no way to tell what the key was, and therefore no way to tell the contents of a key.
Many-time pad is very, very vague, probably necessarily so. However, not to be rude, but it seems like you might consider a read or two through Applied Cryptography before you begin to announce a new development in one of the most difficult fields of mathematics currently active.
> My question is this: Could I sell enough $10
> shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not
> locking in 20 years of patent protection (and
> the $20,000 to patent it)?"
No. However, you also won't sell a proprietary encryption algorithm. Moreso than for any other software I'm aware of, peer review of crypto algorithms is
Read at Bruce Schneier's page. He explains it better than I expect to be able to. (cryptome.org, IIRC)
> if you had developed a new form of encryption,
> what would you do?
Mail it to the NSA and be watched for the rest of my life by the NSA, instead of mailing it to SlashDot and being watched for the rest of my life by the NSA. At least that way the NSA thinks I'm valuable and trustable.
Big Brother Am Be Your Friend, Yo.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Just be sure to check out the old Bellcore (now Telcordia) patents on S-Key to make sure your idea doesn't conflict.
I didn't quite understand BlackHat's example as he wrote it, so I'll just throw down my own (hoping I have the idea right!).
Let's say you know the victim's account number and that you know that the first 8 bits of the transaction are always the account number, and that you can monitor and change the communication line.
Bank ------ Eve (you) ---------- Alice
You know Alice's account number is 10001000 and if you get from Alice 11110111 you know her account number has been XORed with 01111111. If your account number is 00001111, you can send 01110000 and the bank will think that Alice is sending the money to you.
OK, Mr. Ellison. You've made your point.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
I cracked your cipher. That block doesn't hold very much information, and this was how I ultimately managed to attack it. If you look closely and do qwerty-transformation, you can detect patterns in the resulting block.
In ciphertext, these patterns include portions such as "KJH", "kjh", "LKJH" on the top row alone. Similar patterns repeat all over the message. Analysis of the patterns in transformed cipherblock reveals overlapping of two signals in your message, each having a 4- to 5-state cycle. When plotted into the two-dimensional qwerty-space (keyboard layout translation), these sequences then encode the real message as starting position, unroll direction and the overlapping frequency. The decoding process involves mapping these 4- and 5-state cycles into a plucker-space, then normalized through dimension reduction, calculating the average interference of the signal variances which will then be applied against a keytable (generated from the word "slashdot", which I determined through a bit-rolling hybrid variant of the meet-in-the-middle and differential cryptoanalysis attacks) through a mere lookup process. After this, the last step is to throw the whole thing through the serpent-cipher's S-boxes 1337 times total, after which every nibble (4-bit sequence) of the result is reversed. The result is the plaintext, pretty simple huh?
So, at least your cipher wasn't very secure, and I also was a little disappointed you didn't encrypt description of what you actually did. Instead, the message contained a joke about "hot grits" (did I get that right?) and someone called Natalie naked, petrified, and turned into profit after an undefined step.
Or, could it be that this is part of the cipher, too, and I didn't manage to decrypt it? I must continue studying this! It's now time to google for naked pictures of this said lady for a reference material, they must be the key to the next step of the decrypting process...
All I got from that was: "You're gonna shoot your eye out".
*shrugs*
In case anyone is scratching their head at this...
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Just about everyone 'invents' a better one-time pad. You'd be well advised to either open it for peer review (as with Blowfish, TwoFish, AES, PGP, etc.) or hure Counterpane under an NDA to tell you if you're all wet or not.
Good Luck!
Remember Lexington Green!
Why does this guys new "invention" sound suspiciously like public key cryptography to me, only minus the public aspect, thereby making it much less useful?
All circuits busy.
Encrypt a message using the first n bytes of the pad - send this.
Concatenate the plaintext with the entire pad and pass the result through a secure hash (SHA1, maybe) giving you a mangle key.
Encrypt the entire pad with the mangle key to give you the new pad.
Now
OPTs are provably secure. This isn't.
It may have some benefits over a conventional shared-secret approach, but I doubt it. Systems such as AES, twofish and the like are probably plenty good enough and more efficient (space and time).
I used to invent crypto systems, until I studied the art. Now I know how useless I was at it.
One tip I would add is: begin your message with (say) 256 bits of entropy. If anyone can attack symmetric crypto, it'll throw a handy spanner in their works.
"My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'."
I take a one time pad...use it to set 3 no 4 wheels each with 26 letters on them. then have 2 additional wheels to interchange. I have a plugboard on the back to further complicate things. It reuses one time phrase but alters after each use to defeat all known cryptanalysis. thus many-time pad from initial one time pad.
*checks patent*
seems some german guys are using this....
=-P
you'll shoot your eye out...
If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, hump its leg.
See subject line
Let me guess, make a multi gig random "one time pad" and use it as a one time pad, but start from a different location each time, or sample it in different patterns.
Guess what, it's been done.
Yes it is unbreakable, if your source data is truely random. (It probaly isn't)
Shannon proved the OTP to be a secure cypher some years after 2WW. Also "multiple" OTP really IS a VERY secure cypher ( any cryptographer will argee ). Take a really long key with a good random entrophy, 10 Gigabite long key, no problem, ultimate cypher.
So you can patent it, you can brand it, you can sell it, whatever.
But you are missing one crucial point here ( and most of the Slashdot readers also ).
The PROBLEM is that you can NOT use or even dare to sell to the public such a cypher ! Why do you think that RSA released so short-key 128, 256, 1024... encryption only ?? Do you think that RSA choosed this short-bit keys in idle fency ?
The answer is: you can use only APPROVED cyphers and cryptography, this means weak, legal, breakable.
By "breakable" understand breakable by federal and military super computers not by your PC of course.
Your cypher must be agreed by many federal commitees and such a "nasty" OTP cypher will be shut down
( I am 99.9% sure ).
Save your money and brain time.
I was in your shoes about a year ago. Personally I would patent the hell out of it, I did. There was no way I was going to waste 2 years of my life just to give what I invented away for FREE. Screw OSS!. I would suggest though that you get a good patent lawyer. Don't only get a US patent, but also go for an international one. It takes alot longer, but in the end it is worth it.
take your time to prove P=NP and design a perpetuum mobile while you are at it. Then release everything together as a package.
Editors? Hello? Any clue?
I passed the Turing test.
... and that something is peer review. Cryptography is extremely tricky to get right. And if you're the sole custodian of your idea, chances are you've got it wrong and the idea is worthless. Do you feel lucky? Lucky enough to risk $20K on a patent, only to have someone break it as soon as the patent is published? Perhaps shopping it around (under an NDA) to some experts in the field would be a good preliminary step. Do this with a lawyer's help, though. You don't want premature disclosure under the wrong conditions to screw up your chances for a patent!
Banya: THAT'S GOLD JERRY!!!! ...GOLD!!!!
Berto
I won't bother detailing the "obvious" issues with a plain XOR, especially for a multi-use pad (which is what we're talking about): I'll leave that to Google.
Maybe next time.
Synergy is your friend
You'd encrypt something?!?
I'd post an Ask Slashdot. Surely those helpful Slashdot people would give me a useful answer.
(notwithstanding the extremely highly unlikliness that you have found such an algorithm)
If someone ever infringed on your patent, how would you prove it?
Why, I would just...
...
ahh... emmm...
D'oh!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I use encryption to keep my files secure because I don't necessarily trust the security of the medium they're stored on; I don't want anyone to be able to decrypt them except me, which would be possible even if I was the only one with the algorithm. There's also one-way encryption which is an encryption function that is mathematically impossible (or atleast extremely difficult) to reverse. The best example of uses for this is storing passwords: encrypt the password using one-way encryption, store it, whenever someone attempts to use the password encrypt that guess and compare the two, if they're the same, the original data were the same hence the password was correct.
You can't be unbreakable against brute-force attacks because brute-force is guaranteed to work, as long as you have enough time! Brute force means that you try every single possible key!
Actualy, OTP is protected against brute force because every single 'key' works, but they all produce diffrent outputs.
Think about it this way. Imagine for a bit that there are no books longer then the Oxford english dictionary. If you tried to brute force decrypt an OTP copy of the OED, you would have a copy of the OED in your 'pile' of decrypted stuff. You would also have every other book ever writen in your pile, along with every book that will be writen, and every book that anyone ever thought of writing, as well as an insanely large number of books full of garbletygook.
There is no way to tell which book is the 'real' book. In fact, all you're really doing is generating books at random.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Just go to the bank you do business with and get a $20,000 loan. If you have a decent credit rating, it should be no problem at all. You could also take out a loan against your 401(k), or even a home equity loan. Rates are great right now. The point is, there's no reason to involve a third party who has an interest in your invention, just to get the funds to patent it.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
I have discovered a remarkable new encryption system, but unfortunately it is too small to XOLMQ KRLQW MAAWE HRGTY QOKKQ DNAJS.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Just apply and interview at the NSA for a phat civil service job. Let them pay to patent it.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
hehe every day i hear more and more about patent law.. and to think, im only 2.5 yrs away from my patent degree.. w00t w00t. hehe $$$$
For those of you who are curious, the submitter's website is right here
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'd read some cryptography books. It may not be as secure or revolutionary as you believe. (I've heard a few people describe other crypto functions that they created, and, without exception, they're not as secure or revolutionary as they think they are.) So, do some heafty learning about crypto. Or tell someone who knows their crypto - so they can give you an intelligent opinion about it. Perhaps a non-disclosure agreement would allow you to stop them from using it themselves.
Regardless of the good that you want to do to society, there was a sacrifice incurred by yourself and your family. Make sure your decision balances these two factors. For example, you can publish it with a license that is open but does not give all your rights away, so people can use it for non-commercial purposes. Reserve the right to license it for commercial usage. Then go get a job with the NSA or a big security shop. EIther of these places would love (and pay top dollar) to hire a guy that has the initiative to build a better mouse trap.
You can also get a SBA loan and open a skeleton shop to substain the patent application, then use the license fees as the main revenue stream for the shop. Since yu are allowing free access to the technology for non-commercial use, nobody can bitch about it.
If you want to use the invention as resume fodder, you MUST patent it first to avoid your employer trying to steal it from you (or if working for the feds, classifying the whole damn thing).
If you GPL it first you will still keep bragging rights but you will not get any compensation for the time spent.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Sorry Kip Knight, but I find it hard to believe that you have come up with anything new. By refusing to disclose your invention, you have kept those who would tell you how wrong you are from doing so. For a one-time key to be provably secure, the key must be as the sum of all messages sent using it; any other method, such as re-using key space on the assumption that said re-use will not provide enough information to break the code, specifying a source of future key space in a message (since this is equivalent to using a key shorter than the message, assuming finite numbers of commonly-accessible sources of data), or manipulating the message in advance (to make it less recognizable, or to reduce size and to save key space), is obvious and/or dangerous. Also consider that the one-time pad comes from math, and may not be patentable due to the ban on patenting mathematical formulas.
Furthermore, any variation on the one-time pad is rather useless, since it ignores the practical problem in cryptography, which is key exchange. All modern cryptography works on the assumption that an analyst can observe *everything* you send and receive, including keys, and the solution to this is public/private key crypto. If you have to meet in person to exchange keys, it's easy to exchange large ones (CD-Rfulls of key), so re-using a key doesn't provide much real benefit.
If anything I'm saying is news to you, then you should forget the whole thing, since your invention is probably worthless. If you are aware of all this and still think that you have a useful and patentable invention, then you should find someone very knowledgeable in cryptography to talk to, get an NDA, and discuss what you have.
Yeah right... Only "technologists" fear and despise lawyers.
Then go to court and battle the stupidity of software patents. Noone will make a better case than you on this front.
If you do this the rising tide will lift all boats. Such things are not forgotten.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Hehe, I'm just another random AC, but fuck you buddy! Log in? What sort of "proof" is that? Oooh, it's the accredited zbuffered! Sign their name?
John C. Handmemycock
Was this guy's name Thien Pham? Just wondering... I know a guy who works pretty much in the same way. He's now trying to market his "encryption" for use in the US's National ID system inside smart cards. The only thing secure about it is the assumption that no one else knows how it works. Dissassemble the compiled algorithm, and whammo.
Of course I didn't actually see the algorithm... that would ruin the whole thing!
Lots of good points here but lets see what the first step should have been...
I need opinion on making something free/open source (whatever) or making it commercial...
I'll ask around on Slashdot for an unbiased opinion....
Perhaps, at the same time, I should ask if it would be a good idea to sell all rights to it to Microsoft...
If I invented an unbreakable cipher, I'd get a story about it placed in a highly visible news forum, but reveal none of the details. Then wait for the NSA to contact me to convince me not to make it public. Negotiate for as much money as possible. Of course, you'll need a time-delayed system that will distribute the algorithm unless you intervene at regular intervals (to ensure your safety.) Better yet, just bluff that such a system exists, since if it really exists, they'd know when they found it.
For great justice.
If you think you are right:
a) patent it
b) license it for free to all who liek to use it
c) license it only for GPL projects if you prefere that
However, I'm pretty sure you are a hoax.
Proof that it is protected agaisnt a brute force attack?
How silly!
You cant protect against a proof fore attack, it seems you do not know what brute force means: you test every posible combination. With bad luck I have the chance to find the kley in my first try.
With bad luck I find the key after the last sun in the universe is glown out.
However: I ALLWAYS WILL find it if I just have the time to calculate and test long enough.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
--yo kip, howdy. I believe I remember you from a certain overrun with bushbots forum I used to frequent, but I won't hold that against anyone, heh. Anyway, I *think* if you open source it and shareware/beg on it, AND simultaneously ask for a job programming from someplace based on the "this is just too dang cool"-ness of your new encryption that a security company (or whomever) will snatch ya up for decent moolah. Besides being a hero you'll get a lot of exposure, and a revolutionary new encryption is a heckuva resume. I think it'll stand out in the hordes of 'certified" this or that out there. Good luckski!
It seems to me everybody here want you to patent the idea. But I mean, if this is really such a good algorithm, you'll get FAMOUS and get a GOOD JOG ANYWAY. Patenting is expencing and takes a lot of time...
Not being in the crypto world, I may be incorrect on this, but I would say that AES is not mathematically secure. In fact, anything that can be brute forced is not mathematically secure.
Rather, it is (by current standards) practically secure.
-- jetlag --
-some cypherpunk
Obviously, I would fpsdohugpiefgkld fglhfqjklghsejkrhtgjksdfhjkgdhfksjgh gkfdjhgjksdfhgjsdf dfsghgkjfhsjkgwhsdjfkhgsd gdfgdf(èg'è fdsgdf(' gfd!fdèg(!dfg 36HGK3GJ3G5JH3G5HJV FGSDV978XC6 V7B6BV G5JGJH546G.
A#()@KDHLSAMB@#KJH!@MDFKJHKJ!BN#@MB!@#KJ*(!r ypted: "I would post encrypted messages to Slashdot")
(Dec
Shit happens :-)
Is that he's taking a really really large one-time pad, then giving bytewise (or bitwise) offsets into the data, then XORing with the cleartext to get the cyphertext.
This would have two serious weaknesses. First off, if it were used enough times and there were overlap of data, the computing necessary to pick out the overlap and solve it would be doable. Given a bitwise offset on a billion bit (128 megabyte) one-time pad, a supercomputer could rattle through the billion possible combinations while comparing double frequencies and find the overlap, and both messages could potentially be solved.
The other problem would be the physical existence of the one-time pad; unlike a memorized passphrase in combination with an obscured key, the pad can be stolen.
This idea DOES have some merits, however; in combination with a modern cryptosystem, it would add greatly to the obscurity of the cyphertext and help prevent its being analyzed.
... is worth what you pay for it. So here goes :-). File the provisional patent on the concept. This establishes the date. The clock starts and you have a year to file the utility patent. In that year research the heck out of the method and crypto in general. Consult with a good to great crypto authority under NDA. If the concept proves sound proceed with a utility application. While pending (the utility patent) publish the method and get comments. Make the application have claims broad enough to cover "tune-ups" to the method, but not so broad as to be unreasonable. License for non-commercial use for free if that is what you want, and charge a fee for commercial use, but remember that 1000 sales at $0.10 is better than 50 sales at $1.00 (generally). The easier you make it to use, the more widespreaad it will become.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Nevermind all the people who are saying that your claim is rediculous... the answer to your question is: Patent it.
Then you have the protection you need. You can have it peer reviewed (because nobody is going to believe your claims otherwise), and then decide the terms you want to license it under.
If you want to give it away after that, you are free to do so. If you want to keep it (provided your claims are true, you have a gold mine)
Of course, a great many cryptographers will tell you that they have a proof that says that a re-useable key is always breakable.
And that stuff about an OTP being vulnerable to a known plaintext attack makes no sense. If you know the plaintext, it doesn't MATTER if you konw the key. The point of an OTP is to obscure the plaintext.
Was that man named "Bill Gates"?
A quick search on his mailadress on google turns up this:
"Jonathan Kipling Knight has a BS in Physics, an MA in Applied Mathematics and is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science."
Hardly enough credentials to guarantee that he's not a crackpot, but enough to allow the possibility that he has some basic understanding of cryptographics.
A search on google groups shows that he has never discussed on any crypto groups using this mail adress or his name. So not very active on the scene.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I think you need to go back to your proofs a little. The reason it's called a One Time Pad is that its bits can't be reused or they can be guesses. Systems have be devised to "Re-Use" OTP's but the result is always a system that may be strong, but isn't as strong as a OTP.
There is a protocol for exchangin OTP's over a DC-Net that's pretty cool, but ultimately flawed.
Say you managed to discover an algorithm that made factoring easy, to the degree that cyphers dependent on the intractability of factoring would be completely compromised. What would you do with with this extremely dangerous information?
The only reasonable action I could think of is to anonymously (through a dozen anonymous remailers) email a description of the algorithm to Bruce Schneier, entrusting him to proceed with this knowledge in whatever way he finds most prudent. I surely wouldn't want to be associated with the discovery and the calamity that would follow, and somehow I feel like Bruce Scheier could be trusted to act responsibly and intelligently.
Release it freely. If it is actually good (or can be made good), use it to become famous, and find employment on that fame. Don't bother spending money patenting it because that would be a waste of money.
First, because there is no shortage of really good encryption available for free, you aren't going to be able to sell it.
Second, because it doesn't work, there is no point in wasting money trying to patent something that is faulty.
How do I know it doesn't work? Because nearly no one can design good cryptography, so chances are yours isn't any good either. And, yours is currently secret; secret cryptography is almost poor. Sure, you might be not be able to see how it is defective, but that only means it is tougher than your ability as a cryptanalyst. Good cryptanalysts are rare. You also seem to say that OTP is vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks, which as I understand it is simply false. A OTP has terrible key distribution problems and there are always attacks outside the strict domain of the encryption, but a one time pad is, if you define the problem as a narrow cryptographic problem, perfect. This makes me doubt your abilities.
Sorry to be so harsh,
-kb, the Kent who tries to know how much he doesn't know about cryptography.
GnuPG is licensed to you under the GPL, and the GPL is incompatible with all forms of shareware.
It is also incompatible with patented software, unless the patent is licensed to all users in a way compatible with the terms of the GPL.
Please see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html
and read section 7 of the GPL carefully.
I would do exactly the same. I'd ask Slashdot!
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
...it's just that technologists are the weakest of the weak when it comes to understanding and exercising their legal rights.
The CHAIR, or even some variants such as a STOOL, BENCH, or SOFA, all encompass prior art for your invention, methinks.
If it's not truly random, it's not a OTP.
To be a OTP, it MUST be random.
Umm.
Lets see now:
I can A) Patent it and non-exclusively license it (giving me the option to license it for open source initiatives, thus freeing my conscience and still feeding my family)
Or B) Give it away and be hailed as a hero at my funeral because I died of starvation from lack of money.
Personally, I go for choice A,
Anyone else?
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
There is a little known loophole in the filing of patents that allows you to mail your idea to them. Once the letter arrives, you have 2 years to file the patent for your idea (that is just the submission, not the entire process).
This loophole exists for people like you who have an idea, but are not willing to pay a patent lawyer without testing it.
PS: This is my first slashdot post, so please be kind...
hey submitter: take her up on it. she's hella cute! (and has a 4 digit uid so she must be badass)
Lookin out the window... Thats a patent. :(
ive failed, i cant remember the rest of the Simpsons quote
Slash-for-Thought
Even with a good idea, the possibility of going broke starting a new company is immense. If you release your idea gpl'd, you bear none of that liability and it will give you an opportunity to capitalize on your new found fame, in terms of high profile employment, etc... Also it will give you the opportunity to achieve more wide-spread adoption than would otherwise be possible.
That is of course, if your idea is all that you say. When reading the topic, I felt extremely ekeptical. I have always heard that those who understand the basics of cryptography are most likely to fool themselves in the way that the poster seems to be doing.
Well, since this is crypto related, I think an even better way would be to use the PGP Timestamping Service.
It has several different modes, but basically you just encrypt your ideas, send an email to the timestamper with the encrypted files and it will sign the file, and the signature will contain a timestamp and a serial number.
The signatures are available on a daily basis and are posted weekly at alt.security.pgp for all the world to see.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Really, there is no such thing as Many-time Pad.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
Lots of people have said that your idea probably isn't new and I'd like to expand on that with some personal experience.
:-)
One of the areas of programming that interested me most at college was sorting algorithms, but I never did much research into the subject. A couple of years ago I was looking for a fun little programming project to challenge myself with, so I decided to see if I could come up with a really fast sorting algorithm. It was an interesting project because (a) I was interested in the subject but (b) I was approaching it from a position of pretty much zero knowledge.
Now as boastful as this may sound I promise it's true, but the first idea I tried took about two hours of programming and was blisteringly fast and efficient. On a P2-233 with 128Mb it could take 100,000 lines of text (up to 255 chars in tests) and sort them into alphabetical order in less than a second. Not bad eh?
Great, methinks, I'm a genius, but I was curious to know how much of a genius so I trawled the web to find info on the fastest sorting algorithms to see how much better they were.
Well, long story short, my algorithm *was* the fastest one, but it was already known about and in common usage. Good for the ego in one way, but disappointing in another.
So back to the point: Are you sure your idea is new?
good !necessarily= new
Not to mention the fact that if you consulted your supervisor or used university property in the process of coming up with the method they probably own it for the purposes of patenting it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Mail me (oops ^H^H) Bill Gates the algorithm. I'm sure I (no ^H) he, will have my (damn, ^H^H) his crack security people validate your claims and then do the right thing by it.
If you can't trust me (shit! ^H^H) him, who else can you trust?
Yours Belovedly,
Not Bill Gates
Your description sounds like the classic descrption of what Bruce Schneider calls "snake oil". You have a great new encryption algorithm that you've been sitting on.... If you've been sitting on it, nobody knows if it's any good. The best cryptographers don't really know if their algorithm is really any good until lots of other cryptographers have had time to beat on it and test it. The only algorithms that anybody with any sense will use are ones that have been open, and for a long time, so that they can truly be scrutinized.
So, in a word, it doesn't matter. I'd rather you didn't patent it, because software patents are generally evil anyway, and if the algorithm turns out to be useful for something, it could create headaches later. But, as far as cryptography goes, if it is truly as you describe, it's effectively worthless at the moment, and will continue to be so until lots of people have had a chance to see and work on the algorithm.
-Rob
I used it to protect my source code, then I forgot the password.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
You can get a Provisional Patent, first. This is good for one year, and it protects you from the date you filed the Provisional Patent. After one year, you either have to patent it or let it drop, and you can lose the patent rights to your invention. It is a lot easier to write up.
The Provisonal Patent is fairly cheap, I think it costs a couple hundred dollars, plus whatever fees a lawyer might charge. You can get away with far less than $1,000. Then in that year, you can let people look at it to see if it is unbreakable. And, try to find someone to help fund your idea.
I know a good patent lawyer.
Jerry
jhopkins99@aol.com
Informative? ROFLMAO
Plaintext XOR pad = Ciphertext
If cipherbit = 1, possibilities are:
0 XOR 1 = 1
1 XOR 0 = 1
If cipherbit = 0, possibilities are:
0 XOR 0 = 0
1 XOR 1 = 0
With no pad, there's a fifty-fifty guess. Knowing the plaintext doesn't help solve that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sorry, there is no such thing as 'unbreakable' encryption. Look at EVERY OTHER METHOD OF ENCRYPTION used in the past. Encryption is an arms race; an equation of computing power over time. You've invented something new, you've invented something good; make money off it while you can.
If the "new" algorithm uses digits of "pi"
or related algorithms, don't bother patenting it!
it doesn't work. forging mail is sooo easy and it would never hold up in court.
there is a way to copyright your stuff cheaply involving a notary -- basically you give the notary a copy and they hang on to it for you. notarys are like government approved honest people.
back to the forging the self-mailing thing -- to forge:
1. mail an empty envelope to yourself with weak tape sealing the flap
2. hang on to envelope for 10 years
3. place patented material in envelope and seal
4. forgery complete, sue for prior art.
other possibilities include steaming open your sealed envelope and replacing the contents.
a visit to the notary usually costs less than $20.
fear is the mind killer
I, too, have developed an electronic one-time-pad authentication technique, but have found ways to use it in many more situations. Mainly, its good for data encryption using random-based, non-repeating encryption keys. It yet has to prove the test of time, also, but has been looked over from some very worthy folks (a few cert guys, some crypto-head PhD's, etc). Drop me a line if you would like more information. I should have a whitepaper published soon, but wouldnt mind to seeing what kind of support there is for this type of projects.
-Jason
jllst76[at]jerky[dot]net
Cook them dinner. Work for a living. You want to become undeservedly rich by introducing the world an an idea we're doing quite alright without, and then charging us when it becomes ubiquitous? Go to hell.
The strength of such a "pad" having a very long string of random letters/numbers is that, when using a different starting point in the random string each time, there is no algorithmic relationship between subsequent encryptions of even an identical message string - hence no algorithmic attack can be used.
Now that you have explained the approach I would like for you to analyze what you have said along with any hints as to why I think it is faulty (hint: s/random/pseudo-random).
why run from Vincenzo?
OK, some people have said patent and license for free to non-commercial uses. There's a much safer approach that will save the inventor some money, although at the risk of some embarrassment:
1) Time stamp a document containing your results. There are lots of ways of doing this, with either automated services (such as "Stamper" at http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm), or just posting the document on Usenet.
2) Tell someone else -- I'd suggest making a very public release on some forum. Incidentally, your write-up should say that you will apply for a patent. In the U.S. you have a year after publication to file for a patent.
3) Submit to a conference, like CRYPTO.
By publishing, you've established ownership so noone else can patent your technique later (because yours would now be "prior art"), and you can still patent if it holds up to scrutiny. But you also save yourself the patent fees if it doesn't.
I'd be willing to put a little bit of money on a bet that the result would be that a weakness would be discovered. If by "perfectly unbreakable" you mean an infinite unicity distance, there are only two ways you can do that: use a random key (i.e., a one-time pad), or encrypt completely random data (which would be pretty useless). Anything else (yes, *anything* else) will have a finite unicity distance, and so cannot be claimed to be completely unbreakable.
I would take the process and print it out. Hell, I'd make lots of copies. Then I would put that stack of encryption goodness next to my toilet and use it to wipe my ass after taking a shit.
The middle mind speaks!
Yawn.
Unless it does everything one of the existing crypto algorithms does 10 times faster, or with 10 times less memory, who cares? Why would anybody bother using some new, untested algorithm when there are plenty of good alternatives already, some of them FREE??? Even if it was infinitely more secure than Blowfish, so what? Blowfish is PLENTY secure...
A new crypto algorithm makes a very nice PhD dissertation. But it's commercial value is pretty much zilch.
Gavin Andresen, Dev Head, http://www.zform.org/ "Video games that bring the blind and sighted together."
OTP's are unbreakable its just very hard to find a source that can be used to generate numbers with enough entropy. Its called a one time pad because you use each randomly generated number only once. So if I understand what you ment by multipule time pad correctly, your either using the random digits more than once (which would decrease the strenght) or you're making multipule passes (which means some large key files).
ha! You're the MAN! That's great.
Even in the US you'd have to challenge the patent in court and the burden of proof is on you.
In the rest of the world you'd just get laughed at until you hang up.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
The MTP cannot be as secure as the OTP. However, it's not obvious to me that its significantly weaker.
A one-time pad is a a sequence of random bits b0..bn.
A plaintext message is a sequence of bits p0..pm with m =< n.
The cyphertext is the sequence of bits c0..cm where ci = pi xor bi.
Since the bi are random, the ci are also random - hence in the absence of the OTP the cyphertext is undecodable.
Important: having decyphered the message, both sender and receiver delete bits b0..bm from their OTPs.
The problem with OTPs is arranging for secure delivery of b0..bn in the first place, without interception.
It seems the poster is suggesting that there is a secure way to use OTPs, without the important step of discarding used bits. This means that bits will be reused according to some function. So in effect the "many time pad" (MTP) is generating a longer stream of "xoring" bits from a b0..bn - that is, the MTP "xoring" bits m0... are constructed according to mi = f(i, b0..bn) - with f presumably being publically available - and the cypher text is given by ci = pi xor mi.
The problem is that for infinitely many i, j, k, f(i, b0..bn) = f(j, b0..bn) = f(k, b0..bn)...
After we have seen enough cyphertext go by (presumably many, many times more than n+1 bits, if f is any good) we will start to learn more and more about b0..bn (xored with some plaintext). Eventually we will collect a library of bits
pi xor f(i, b0..bn), pj xor f(j, bo..bn and so forth where we know that f(i, b0..bn) = f(j, b0..bn), hence we can work out pi xor pj. But this is just the xor of two non-random plaintext messages, which is subject to fairly straightforward attack.
So the upshot of it all is that if f is good then you should be able to (significantly) extend the life of your OTP, but eventually you will have to ditch the b0..bn and get some new ones. However, if for, say, n = 10^9 you get a useful lifetime of, say, 10^18 message bits, then you'll be happy with your scheme for a long time!
That said, you still have to solve the key exchange problem, which is the real stopping point with symmetric crypto systems.
'cause telling the public about your inbvention is a good way to prevent anyone, including you, from ever getting a patent on it!
Basically, it's like shootin yourself in the foot.
Seeking free legal advice on a public board is a really dumb idea, for about 19 different reasons.
nbHF48FKJH4F;kjh4LKJHhNB498CN4I
SKLJ4H9sdflkjh48B3498HW4IFN4IN8
OKDNJ48458DI4.SL4993;W5497GKH48
2HCB4KBHS843,JNS,JH43872B34JYB4
ZMNB48lkjh48BB4JHG8cbhbj8675309
You built a beowulf cluster of WHAT?
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Jason Freidman
I suppose what's really at issue here is a moral question. Is it better to serve the interests of free-speech and expression with no assured great profits or is it better to get those profits for the financial security of one's family at the probable loss of momentum towards greater freedom? Since I tend to lean towards the idealistic, I'd probably go with the open-source route believing that creating such a good foundation for greater freedom would certainly come back in many positive ways to both oneself and one's family. But just the same, it is a difficult decision and you deserve respect for your efforts no matter which route you take.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
How come we never see articles about random people revolutionizing brain surgery? -- Bruce Schneier
Let's face it, don't open source it, and you don't have enough $$ to patent it. Go to RSA, and give them a demo. RSA has its hooks into every encryption user. You, as a joe nobody, don't have the infrastructure needed to sell, market, develop, and support encryption.
The open source folks just want it for free. With RSA, you'll get paid. No question RSA would be better. The open source folks will bitch and moan, but that's what they do.
Take the $$ for the patent, and get a lawyer to NDA RSA.
I think I'd use it to encrypt stuff.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I've always suspected it, but now we have proof that the Slashdot editors don't actually really know all that much about computers: apparently none of them had heard of Shannon's Theorem.
Of course, there is another possible explanation, which is that they actually just don't know that much about editing. Not that professionals have necessarily set them a good example, but still you'd think that a computer nerd would be able to sniff out questionable stuff to some degree, at least compunerdy questionable stuff.
OK, end of rant.
1) Read everything Nolo provides regarding patents and trade secrets.
2) Patent it yourself.
3) Prepare an iron clad NDA/Trade Secret plan yourself.
4) Have a specalist lawyer bullet proof your NDA/Trade secret plan.
5) Hire a lawyer under your bullet proof trade secret plan
6) Hire someone who knows how to start a company while you help protect your ownership rights to your invention under your bullet proof plan.
7) Sell your super product
8) After you have earned enough money for you and your family, take some of the excess cash and pay lawyers to help you find ways to start a patent sharing scheme that grants people license to use your patent if they grant you rights to the inventions they create based on it.
9) If the company you found turns out to bite you make sure there is a poison pill where you as the inventor can open the invention free to the world without negative consequences.
Most importantly, ASK PHIL ZIMMERMAN FOR HELP EVEN IF YOU MUST BEG HIM OR BRIBE HIM. He's been there, and got screwed. Doubtless he learned something about how he would do it the second time around. You see he knows more about this than us Slashdotters.
BTW, if you are looking to hire an experienced software developer or just getting started at project management type. I need a damn job and you need a Gantt for your project. Just kidding, sorta.
~~ What's stopping you?
all your bits are belong to us.
If this guy thinks the known-plaintext "attack" to OTP is a problem, then he don't know what a OTP is.
For those of you who don't know, every byte in a one-time pad is used to encrypt one and only one byte. Ever. If you know the plaintext and the ciphertext, you can derive the key, for that one byte, but that information is useless for every other byte in the ciphertext.
Not to troll--I am only a student and not real knowledgable about crypto--according to the _Handbook of Applied Cryptography_, a One Time Pad as long as the message space is theoretically unbreakable (for obvious reasons; the number of possible keys is equal the number of possible messages). So the OTP shouldnt be susceptible to a known plaintext attact if it is as long as the message space. If thats your invention... Not to quibble, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. S
hmmm... submit his research using the "unbreakable encryption"; ever read Digital Fortress by Dan Brown?
Prior art only exists if the information was publicly available, which excludes anything in a safe, unopened letter, trade secrets, under NDA or similar.
in madison wisconsin there is a group that is called WORF. What they do is help inventors get patents, they are a non-profit organizations so they don't get anything from it. The restrictions are they will never sell the patent to a larger corporation. This means you will never be super rich for it, but you will get royalties from it.
We bagged the whole business (lack thereof) Only gov't is in the encryption business. Irregardless, your contribution to progress, gov't will see to it that only the weak survive.
I would sell it for a big company for like 2-5 years for initially a nice sum of cash and royalties of their product, after that i'd release the code in NON ready to use format and sell shareware copies of it for 1 year, then i'd release the whole program.
Non ready form = only algorithm not programs itself to use it, thus open source community would come up with their own apps etc... to use it. this second step can be left out and release all of it at that time tho, it wont give so much cash anyway that it would matter a lot.
thats what i would probably do.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
kIdiKsuIWldopSPiSUiIU83Sjs8kaAS DIe81aIhATDODAqxiAid9Ad1dMnzAmq
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If he wants to make a few quick bucks, (and it can be proven that it's not 'easily' broken) then he should consider selling it to his local intelligence agency. If interested, he'll be well lined for a long time.
But will any patented algorithms be accepted going forward? The RSA patent caused enough annoyance that I think everyone adopting crypto is wary of patents. And one of the criteria for the AES was freedom from patent encumbrance. We already have more than enough unencumbered algorithms for the recognized tasks such as block cipher, stream cipher, public-key. I think a patented algorithm would only be used if it provides substantial capabilities beyond what we have now (very unlikely) or if the patent itself were desirable to ban interoperable implementations.
The security of the one time pad relies on two things: that the key is the same length as the plaintext, and that the key is completely random and only used once. Using the same key more than once destroys the security, period.
This probably applies to any cryptosystem, BTW. ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Aside from the fact that the claim is incredible...
As other posters point out, everyone can develop their own ciphers that they think is unbreakable. It's not until massive peer review for many years before they become trusted as unbreakable, and thusly become of any value.
Attempting to patent a cipher before this is a waste of money, and patenting it after peer review is likely impossible.
Put it out for public scrutiny. At least you'll hold the copyright on the reference implementation and be recognized as the inventor, and don't blow $20,000+ just to have someone tell you your cipher is bogus/duplicate/pathetic. :)
Do you have any formal training in information theory, number theory, or advanced mathematics? Just because something that you have created in your bedroom appears to be secure, chances are an experienced cryptanalyst can probably find numerous flaws with it in only a few minutes. Why try and reinvent the wheel... good crypto is out there, take the time to implement it properly. Also, if you claim its provably secure, I'd like to see your proof. You claim the key is long and could fit on a USB device. Well, if it has a long key, how is it different than a one time pad? If it has a long key that you feed into some algorithm in an OFB-like mode, you really haven't invented anything new.
nbHF48FKJH4F;kjh4LKJHhNB498CN4I
SKLJ4H9sdflkjh
OKDNJ48458DI4.SL4993;W5497GKH48
2HCB4KBHS843,JNS,JH43872B34JYB4
ZMNB48lkjh48BB4
How dare you insult my mother like that!
heh... its like a nerdy rorschach inkblot.
In your costs, don't forget to factor in a big pile of dollars to defend your patent in court, the stress it will cause you and the risk that your patent may be designed around or declared invalid after you have gone through all this.
Same goes for trying to sell ideas involving security. If you're not setup to be The Man then you're going to be his bitch in either trying to get the money to patent your wonder-encryption, or later when the lawyers working for some company with deep pockets have their turn.
Your best bet is to patent and make dual-purpose solid-state body-insertable USB data drives in an array of exciting public-domain shapes, with a swath of vibrant colors which could both hold personal information and using the USB bus for power (the best use for USB) give other less useful devices serious competition. Hey, it's the USB drive that drives you wild!!!
Of course, someone will come out with a BlueTooth version of the same thing in the next quarter, but due to poor drivers, limited battery life, and interference from anything and everything you'd still stand to make serious bucks.Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
The same thing I do every day. Try and take over the world.
WTF is a "known plaintext" attack on a one time pad?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
My background: PhD student in cryptography.
As far as I know patents in the crypto industry are not that profitable (with exceptions of course, e.g. RSA). Rather than generate revenue they are used as something to block competitors, or something to trade with: I have this patent, you have that patent, let us grant each other rights to exploit both patents.
Even if a cryptography company wants to use techniques patented by another company it takes ages for the economy guys to actually agree on a technology trade. Therefore the gut instinct of crypto-developers is to invent some other method to get around the problem in question.
If I remember correctly [IANAL, IAAG], patents are invalidated by publication.
That is, you cannot get a patent if the idea has already been published somewhere, *even if you were the one to publish*. Therefore, if you are going to go the patent route, you need to let your patent application be the first publication.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
This is how it works in a perfect world: Take a random string, XOR it with your message (the plaintext) and transmit the result to your friend. To decrypt the message, your friend has to XOR the message he got again with the random string.
There are two problems with that:
We are not able to produce real randomness, we can only use cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators but these are not perfectly random.
The problem of transmitting the random string (the key). It has to be distributed in advance.
If a message gets encrypted twice with the same key, it is highly vulnerable to a statistical attack and therefore nearly useless. Every few days, someone claims to have invented a perfectly secure cryptosystem and posts it on sci.crypt just to have it torn to pieces by them.
To the "inventor" of this new system: If you really feel your algorithm is that strong, offer something about 10000$ to anyone who can break it. That way you can be sure it gets enough attention. This is common practice.
My advice is, stop dreaming about "getting rich for life off one good idea". The only people who'll get rich are the lawyers.
If this algorithm is so great, you could build a carreer on it. Earn the money from doing a worthwhile job.
Whether you pay $1 000 000 or $20 000 for a patent or write it yourself, it wont make any difference. If you are succesful people will contest it.
So get something on paper, submit as a patent, then get out there and try and sell the software/idea or whatever. If its good someone will buy the rights from you leaving you to make money from your consultancy services as the great guru who thought of it.
Hiding it under the bed in case someone steals it, will ensure the idea is safe but you will never make any money.
Get out there and give it a go.
Publish your idea in the relevant scientific journals.
If the idea is good it will stand up to their careful examination and then you can organise a business partner who can cash it on it with you.
If your idea sucks then it will be rubbished and it has cost you nothing to find this out.
No-one else can patent the idea because you can show clear prior art - so open source dudes are able to enjoy your algorithm.
If it's as good an idea as you think you can just milk the publicity bandwagon for a few years as a way of cashing it
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Sell it, if anyone want's to buy it. It's probably not worth much.
Like thousands of others before you, you think you have discovered a way to extend onetime-padding, reusing the key-material in some intricate way.
Unfortunatly it has been proved, that for an algorithm to be unconditionally secure, the key needs to be as long as the plaintext (That is, the information theoretic measure on the key must be larger or equal to the measure on the plaintext).
Your "algorithm" is probably nothing more than a random-generator. Many people have tried to make cryptographically secure deterministic random generators and have usually failed. In 1998 it was constructively proved, that any cryptographicly secure random generator can be used to implement a provable universal hash-function: it's THAT hard.
Actually, the best known random-generators that are considered cryptographically safe are based on RSA and El-Gamal encryption schemas, where a small portion of the output of CBC feedback encryption is "leaked" as the random output. These generators are roughly "as good as the algorithm they are based on".
In recent years so-called "chaos-mathematics" has begun producing promising random-generators, but it's a very new field which has not seen much information-theory and cryptological analysis yet.
--
Helge
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
The strnig "OTP" is clearly part of the comment I was commenting on. The person I replied to said OTP is weak. OTP is not weak.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I am a god?
Those who say it needs to be published and scrutinized are absolutely right, and save you $20K+ in useless filings.
Think of it this way: if it is truly revolutionary, then you'll get famous and hired by a security company for big bucks, beside becoming famous and contributing to world progress. If it's not, it will have saved you money, time, and pride.
Gilles
Burn it and commit suicide.
A piece of advice I've heard for small inventors is to pay the small upfront filing costs, then sell out to a larger company before the full patent fees become due. Obviously you don't make as much this way, but then it's all about risk and return.
The OTP(ONE Time Pad) draws it's strength from there being the
same amount of key as message. So really given
an arbitrary key you can make the message say
anything you want.. It could be "Get bread on
your way home" or "Get plastic explosive on your
way home" just by varying the (Unknown to the attacker) key.
If the OTP key is generated in a way that is not true random, or if it is *EVER* re-used then it completely looses it's strength.. And in some cases is trivial to break.
(Probably uses some encryption alg. to transform the OTP pad into a different pad or the message into a different message before applying the OTP.. Which isn't any more secure if used on multiple messages than the transform alg.)
As for patenting encryption alg's... That seems to be a good way to doom it's adoption, if it is a valid technique... Maybe give a license free to any not for profit organizations... GPG was mentioned but how are you going to transport around the pads required to encrypt messages anyway?(Without using RSA or the like to encrypt and send them... Then your the same strength as RSA.)
Anyway just a few thoughts.
IANAL, so i am just asking. Many times, we have an idea, implemented, we can document it to a large extent, etc. But we can't patent it So the question really is:
If you can prove you developed certain idea prior to someone else patenting it, do they owe you anything? What are your rights in that case?
If you have some nice rights, then one great thing would be to have a Black (as in nobody knows what it is protected) Anti-Patent Firewall.
How would it work? A central database controlled by a company, where you would send them all your information, and an encripted patent (key you and your company will have to decript). They would certify the date of submission (attorney, notary, etc), and create the record and label the field of discovery and everything that you want disclosed beforehand. You could pay them X bucks for that service.
Then one day some greedy company files a patent for the obvious, but clever idea you devised, and this company is researching all these patents every day, and they discover it...and voila!
I know...i know...
unfinished: (adj.)
Which part of "one time" you do not understand???
If you lock it in for 20 years then the rest of the world won't use it for 20 years, if they ever use it at all. Your invention does not sound compelling enough to spend money on.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
Be creative.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'd contact the FSF to see if they're interested in developing a pool of patents they can cross license.
I have no faith that I could feed a dog for a year on proprietary gpg extensions.
But if my patented idea, held by the FSF, made it into a lot of key software, I'd be pretty much assured some big points in interviews when I say "Oh, you've used xyztech? Yeah, my algorithm is in that."
No guarantees the FSF is interested in doing this. But I hope so. If they aren't, I'd contact the OSI.
The most likely meaning for the adverb week, would be: having to do with a week, or weeks. And since our names for the week-days come from ancient gods, he was probably likening the one time pad to the unbeatable thunder god Thor.
Well, then I definitely wouldn't be able to break it. I never could get the hang of Thor's Days.
The idea of taking an OTP and turning it into a "many-time pad" is fundamentally flawed. You can't do it. OTP is essentially XOR encryption. XOR encryption itself is very weak with a key that repeats. Of course you can perform various OTP-permutations, maybe a alphabetic shift or numeric addition or somethiong. However at it's core it can be viewed as a binary operation in which it is perfectly random which bit will come next. Thus it's impossible to show any one result for a decryption is valid.
The idea of permuting the pad, or changing it, or anything in a way that's reproducible starts to ruin this. There are lots of things people have tried, but they all end up making the system imperfect, without really removing any of the weaknesses of it.
Of course, if you want an easy way to keep getting new OTP's of a fixed length, just use the newly encrypted message as your new OTP. As long as the original vector remains secret, the new OTP is just as secure (since the 0/1 randomness is preserved).
Not that this is especially usefull but.. neither is a OTP.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
what would you do?
GPL it....yes I am actually that good at heart with the rest of the world...
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
That's right. No patents. No shareware. Post your idea right here for all to see and critique. This is the only way you'll get any credibility whatsoever. Sorry bud, but there's no such thing as unbreakable crypto where the ciphertext is longer than the key. This has been mathematically proven and if you insist otherwise, either you don't understand crypto theory sufficiently or you're off your rocker. So basically what you're talking about here is performing some form of hash or permutation of the pad to make it more difficult to recover from the ciphertext when used multiple times. This is not a new idea, nor is it unbreakable. In fact, if done improperly, it might be less secure than a traditional block cipher. Including the pad hash function / permutation within the first length of ciphertext won't make it unbreakable either--even if it changes with every consecutive use of the recycled pad.
On the other hand, it's nice that you're trying your hand at cryptography.. it's always a fun mathematical game. But for your own sake, let go of the notion that some sort of get-rich-quick idea is waiting for you. Mathematics is a field of discovery. Patenting discovery is plain wrong.
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!
If you are reading this RICK AUSTENSON, I would like to let you know that you are gay and all of slashdot knows it you are about as straight as a circle, you butt pirate.
PS. First Post!!! Eat this Beyotches.
All moderatoirs are gay faggot cunts you jack off to tight assed heterosexual porn.
Note, in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic about the heterosexual thing, everybody knows goatse is gay porn, especially Rick Austenson... Because it is a picture of him!!!!!