[liberationtech] scrambler

[Michael Rogers]

Quoting the Scrambler website:
"The drawback of the one-time cypher pad encryption method is that to encrypt a message without reusing the one-time cypher pad requires it to be 256 times the size of the message. Encrypting a one megabyte file without reusing the one-time cypher pad requires it to be 256 megabytes. While it is recommended that you do not reuse one-time cypher pads, Scrambler will do so."

The author doesn't understand how to construct one-time pads, and flouts the most important rule of using them. Avoid this software like the plague.

Cheers,
Michael

Seth David Schoen <schoen at eff.org> wrote:

>Michael Hicks writes:
>
>> ok so I guess I just send u guys the links and u check out my software and Vet it? This was made for people to be able to protect their privacy and the NSA can't hack it No One can it's impossible. all the information is at scrambler.webs.com
>
>It's true that no one can crack a one-time pad, which your software
>claims to implement.  A one-time pad might be useful for some people,
>though it's possible that they shouldn't then use a computer to encrypt
>and decrypt, because using a computer introduces new vulnerabilities
>(like radiofrequency emanations and remote software exploits).
>
>There might still be cryptographic vulnerabilities in the random number
>generation that your software uses.  There was recently a high-profile
>vulnerability in the random number generation provided by the Java
>implementation on Android, which allowed keys to be compromised.  If
>there were a similar vulnerability in the Java implementations people
>use with your software, it might have similar consequences -- which
>might not be the fault of your software, but might still undermine its
>security.
>
>A one-time pad is probably not very useful to most people who need to
>communicate securely because they have to find a safe way, ahead of
>time, to distribute and store the key material with each potential
>party that they may communicate with.  That's a pretty heavy burden,
>especially when people are meeting new contacts and wanting to
>communicate with those contacts (without having been able to arrange
>a prior physical key distribution).
>
>It also doesn't integrate easily with any form of communications
>other than exchanging files, although it would be possible to extend
>it to other things like e-mail or IM if you could manage the sequence
>numbers properly to avoid reusing key material (something our existing
>protocols don't really help with).
>
>If you read _Between Silk and Cyanide_, there's a good and interesting
>historical account of wartime military use of one-time pads.  One of
>the messages seems to be that it was quite expensive and cumbersome,
>though perhaps well worth it for the particular application.  It's hard
>to imagine many audiences prepared to actually bear these costs for
>many of their communications today.  We already see people complaining
>about the effort and overhead of things like PGP merely because some
>aspects of the key management are made explicit to the user.  For
>one-time pads _every_ aspect of key management is made explicit -- and
>manual, and requiring the exchange of physical objects!
>
>My intuition is that people who feel that one-time pads are necessary
>should probably learn to operate them by hand, the way the SOE agents
>in that book did.
>
>-- 
>Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
>Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
>Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
>815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107
>-- 
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