Re: frequency analysis

["David J. Aronson" <[e-mail]>]

John Stracke wrote:
> 
> David J. Aronson wrote:
> 
> >Now, suppose you salt the plaintext with rarer characters, so as to
> >flatten out the distribution.
>
> I believe compression has the same effect, actually--compression uses
> fewer bits for common characters, and the result is that the
> distribution of bytes is flatter, and harder to attack.

Come to think of it, that's even better than the salting I was
proposing, as it (usually) isn't restricted to printable chars.  So,
let's go with that approach.  Say you take the plaintext, zip it, then
encrypt it.  The question remains, given that the frequency distribution
is fairly even, how does a cryptanalysis program know when it's got it
right?  (If "they" know you've used a specific publicly available
compression program, they can look for its "signature" at the start, but
let's ignore that for now....)

-- 
David J. Aronson, Software Engineer for hire in Philadelphia area
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