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To: supercat
I've read recently that Muslims often memorize large portions of the Quoran. Some scholars memorize the entire thing. Could the Quoran be an obvious but readily available one-time-pad for the terrorists?
57 posted on 10/04/2001 11:03:22 PM PDT by BigBobber
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To: BigBobber
Could the Quoran be an obvious but readily available one-time-pad for the terrorists?

No, since other people have copies of the exact same material. A one-time pad is absolutely secure if, and only if, the key is generated completely randomly and each part of it is used [at most] once and then never against used for any purpose whatsoever. If two messages are sent using the same pad, it will in many cases be possible for an interceptor to decrypt both of them.

It should be noted that the typical cryptosystem used with a one-time pad makes it trivially easy to derive the key given a ciphertext and the corresponding plaintext. If someone has a copy of the ciphertext and can make a good guess as to the original message, one will in so doing be able to make a good guess as to the part of the key used in processing that text. The basis for the security of the one-time pad is that being able to guess the key in such circumstances buys a would-be codebreaker absolutely nothing.

58 posted on 10/04/2001 11:43:32 PM PDT by supercat
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