Is too much encryption a bad thing? post Your opinion?

[ThomasD]

1 hour ago, ybriK said:

I encrypted my mountable drive inside an encrypted mountable drive and inside that is another encrypted mountable drive? Is there a problem here?

Encrypting your encryption is like wearing a belt and suspenders.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The government is afraid that normal people have access to something it can't control, it can't understand, and it can't just walk up and obtain within seconds. That scares them.

 

But what scares me is the government may get zealous with this. What if I just happen to have a drive that was corrupted to high hell with garbage data, but the government thinks it's some kind of encrypted drive and any excuse other than giving them the keys will be seen as resistance. As far as anyone knows, encrypted data looks like random garbage.

[xentropa]

I was really really interested in asymmetric cryptography for a while.  In case anyone is interested, here is how RSA cryptography works.

 

In asymmetric cryptography, the encryption and decryption keys are different.  A public key holder can only do one OR the other.  Only a private key and public key holder can do both.

 

When a message is encrypted with a public key and decrypted with a private key, this is the simple model of web based communication encryption.

 

When a message is encrypted with a private key and decrypted with the public key, this is what digital signatures are.

 

in RSA cryptography we need the following numbers

 

p: a prime number

q: another different prime number

n: a third prime number (Restriction: (q-1)(p-1)/n cannot be an integer)

 

For this example I will use the following values

 

p: 23

q: 29

n: 61

 

Next we need to calculate some important values

 

p*q = 667 

(p - 1)(q-1) = 616

since 616/61 is not an integer, our value of 61 is acceptable.

 

The public key is then pq and n (667 and 61).  Now I'll introduce the mod function.  The mod function is to simply find the remainder of an equation.

 

15 mod 4 = 3 is the exact same thing as 15/4 = 3 remainder 3

16 mod 4 = 0 is the exact same thing as 16/4 = 4 remainder 0

 

Now we need to calculate the private key.  To find the private key we need to solve the following equation.

 

(n) * (private key) mod (p-1)(q-1) = 1

 

The private key happens to be 101 because 61 * 101 = 6161

And 6161 / 616 = 10 remainder 1

 

So our public key is 61, 667

and the private key is 101

 

Let's say our secret message is the number 43

 

to encrypt, the equation is 

43 ^ n mod pq = ciphertext

43^61 mod 667 = 628

 

to decrypt, the equation is 

ciphertext ^ private key mod pq = 43

628^101 mod 667 = 43

 

You can also first encrypt 43 using the private key and let the world decrypt it using the public key to digitally sign something.

 

The reason RSA cryptography works is that it is very difficult to factor pq when pq are very large prime numbers.  If you could factor it, you would be able to determine the private key.

 

[Tech_Dreamer]

11 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The government is afraid that normal people have access to something it can't control, it can't understand, and it can't just walk up and obtain within seconds. That scares them.

 

But what scares me is the government may get zealous with this. What if I just happen to have a drive that was corrupted to high hell with garbage data, but the government thinks it's some kind of encrypted drive and any excuse other than giving them the keys will be seen as resistance. As far as anyone knows, encrypted data looks like random garbage.

more over , if a rogue government, doesn't have to be fully bad, but partially rogue can & it could plant data onto an unsecured area as of a target which can later be linked to as evidence if needed , even a good government can do it , 100000 good things & one shit like this wont count as bad in the big picture

[ThomasD]

On 5/22/2016 at 0:06 AM, M.Yurizaki said:

...

But what scares me is the government may get zealous with this. What if I just happen to have a drive that was corrupted to high hell with garbage data, but the government thinks it's some kind of encrypted drive and any excuse other than giving them the keys will be seen as resistance. As far as anyone knows, encrypted data looks like random garbage.

Possible, but darn unlikely.  It would be a rare sort of failure that loaded a drive with a large amount of truly random garbage.  More likely that problems would appear while the drive was largely patterned data interspersed with enough garbage to make things stop working properly.