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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?
Oh, and another thing I forgot to add. The story starts out "Kip Knight asks". Well, Kip's e-mail address is newtsprism@AOL.COM. That ought to tell you something.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Thank you for pointing out that I mistyped "weak". It is crucial that you did this, especially that you took the time to place it in quotation marks (especially given that it's not a quotation, but a "correction"). You tremendously improved your position by this maneuver.
Having said that, I am not an encryption expert, though I have at times been involved with encryption products (indeed, I submitted bug fixes to the AES reference code). One of the first things I learned in the field of encryption is that first assumptions about encryption are often horribly wrong, and are often treading over ground that's been well worn and dismissed by hundreds of others (encryption is the sort of field where there are thousands of extremely bright people working on it day and night). That's why it's so important that it's a peer review field where nothing is given credibility until it has undergone the analysis of dozens of peers: There are a million flawed assumptions that would have made it into security products if it weren't for this peer review process. 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.
...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.