hmelton@daviscomp.com wrote:
I'm no expert, on cryptology or spread spectrum transmissions, but I
have to disagree with other comments about how improbable it is that
the phantom's tech could do the things it does.
Well, I am something of an expert on crpto -- not a professional,
perhaps (I don't do it for pay, but rather for fun), but I know a fair
bit about it.
It is a very low probability, but not on the order of a flying beanie
hat.
The Bubble Gum Universe uses highly questionable physics for its
boomers and the hardsuits are even more in the realm of fantasy than
reality, especially when it is set less than 50 years in the future.
The laws of physics may be different, but mathematics will be the same.
The comments about the safety of the encryption methods seem close to
the same type of comments the WWII german's made about their
encryption machines.
The Germans did not understand cryptgraphy the way that we do today.
They didn't understand that having a reflecting rotor in the Enigma
weakened the encryption... nor a lot of other reasons why the cipher was
not as strong as they thought it was.
In large part, they relied on the fact that their enemies (at first)
didn't know how the Enigmas worked -- which meant that when we captured
some of the machines, it weakened the whole system. Modern systems are
designed so that even if the enemy knows the design (and it's even
*assumed* that they do), it will still be secure. Indeed, with such
things as DES and AES, the enemey *of course* knows the system, with the
only secret being the key. But since DES and AES are designed right,
the only way to break them is to try all the keys. (DES has a few minor
flaws -- if you have gargantuan amounts of known plaintext/ciphertext
pairs, then you can break it with *slightly* less than brute force)
The Germans didn't change keys as often as they should have (you ought
to use a new key for every message, if it's possible), so when the
Allies discovered a key, it could be used to descrypt many messages,
instead of only one or two. They used keys which spelled out words,
rather than random keys, which meant that if an attacker tries all
"words" first, then random keys, then he can brute force the cipher much
faster. And so on and so forth.
The didn't even *concieve* that the Americans and British could build a
machine which could test large numbers of keys at high speed.
When I say that AES is secure for the next hundred+ years, trust me on
it.
I must agree the story needs to explain how it was possible in some
pseudoscience terms for Phantoms techs to do this so quickly and
easily, perhaps a side story from the past or maybe a add on chapter
with nene threatening severe bodily harm if she isn't told how her
radio transmissions were broken and how they got the data on the
boomers from Genom.
Naah. I would scrap the whole idea of breaking into the KS tactical
network -- just have him send the data to Nene on a tightbeam, as Chan
Wei Lik suggested.
Example
Spread Spectrum is very secure, but at ranges under a few kilometers
this security can break down.
Err, no. Spread spectrum's security doesn't depend on distance.
All modern radios use intermediate frequencies to generate the actual
transmitted frequency
No, they don't.
and any radio also broadcast the resulting beat and harmonic
frequencies usually several decibels down, it is possible
that these unwanted frequencies can give you an unspread copy of the
data the main signal is carrying.
Alas, my friend, you're full of ____.
The fancier modern radios do almost everything digitally, except for the
actual generation of the radio signal itself. That signal may have
harmonics, but they're not harmonic to some fixed frequency, but will be
a harmonic of that cryptographically random, constantly shifting,
frequency. Which means that they're just as hard to track as the
random, shifting, frequency.