FA+
Shop
Note on Technofox
14 years ago
General
In Technofox, our fuzzy nerdette changes the key to an encrypted archive to insert data. I've had a couple of people ask me about this, so I thought it might be nice to go into this in a bit more depth.
Suppose we have a short message:
H E L L O [Original message]
and we have a key the same length as the message
5 2 9 8 2 [Key]
This particular cipher is simple because this is an example: we just "add" the number in the key to the position of the letter in the alphabet. So here, we produce the encrypted string
M G U T Q [Encrypted message]
[And yeah, we're just using capital letters in this example. In reality, it's all binary math, because the computer sees the world as ones and zeros...]
In the story, Technofox and some other people both had access to the encrypted message. They can't break it, because if a key is the same length as an encrypted message and the key is truly random, then there are no patterns to find and exploit.
Technofox then finds the key. She's the only one who has it. But she tells the other people that the key was
9 18 14 13 18
The other people, trusting her [the fools!] then use her key to decrypt the message, and they get
D O G G Y
which is what our clever little fox wanted them to see.
Suppose we have a short message:
H E L L O [Original message]
and we have a key the same length as the message
5 2 9 8 2 [Key]
This particular cipher is simple because this is an example: we just "add" the number in the key to the position of the letter in the alphabet. So here, we produce the encrypted string
M G U T Q [Encrypted message]
[And yeah, we're just using capital letters in this example. In reality, it's all binary math, because the computer sees the world as ones and zeros...]
In the story, Technofox and some other people both had access to the encrypted message. They can't break it, because if a key is the same length as an encrypted message and the key is truly random, then there are no patterns to find and exploit.
Technofox then finds the key. She's the only one who has it. But she tells the other people that the key was
9 18 14 13 18
The other people, trusting her [the fools!] then use her key to decrypt the message, and they get
D O G G Y
which is what our clever little fox wanted them to see.
Essentially, it's an encrypted section of a disk, with a key needed to access the information on it. Theoretically, I think you could break it without a key if you got enough copies of the data over time as it changed, but that wouldn't be easy.
I'd have to say no, here though. In this case the person who originally set up the archive wasn't available; a third party played with the key to deflect attention in another direction.
...Nah, this stuff I picked up from a book about encryption that I read a few years ago. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title...