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Re: Playing Cards
At 7:04 PM 11/15/1996, Hal Finney wrote:
>From: [email protected] (Peter Hendrickson)
>> A well shuffled deck of 54 cards has about 237 bits of entropy. This
>> is easy to use: the program asks the order of the cards, converts this
>> to a string, and runs it through a one-way hash. (Entering the cards
>> is a bit of a nuisance. Is there an easy way to have them read
>> automatically?)
> I heard that Bruce Schneier has devised a cryptosystem based on a card
> deck for a future book by Neal Stephenson. It is supposed to be simple
> enough for a person to use manually, but complicated enough that it can't
> be broken by computer. Your idea of using cards as a one time pad is
> somewhat similar, maybe, although I think Bruce's was designed to be
> useful for long messages, providing computational rather than unconditional
> security.
I, for one, am dying of curiousity. When I asked him about it, he said
he would disclose it "soon".
Peter