rotor alternative?

[John J. Lee]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

> jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) writes:
> > Quite.  I don't understand why it's deprecated.  We've known since the
> > fifties that the algorithm is broken, so wasn't it clear from the
> > start that this was for obfuscation, not strong encryption?  Shouldn't
> > we just add a warning to the docs (if there's not one there already)??
> 
> No.  Using weak cryptographic algorithms for obfuscation should itself
> be deprecated.  If there's a need to obfuscate something, that means
> that somebody is trying to read it when you don't want them to, and
> the correct countermeasure is real encryption, not obfuscation.

First, not necessarily, if you're in a country that has legislation
controlling strong encryption (and yes, we know "that should be
fixed", but sadly we don't have that power ;-).  Second, if you have
to have the key around anyway (true for some applications), it really
doesn't matter how secure the algorithm is.

Obfuscation is a perfectly sane thing to want to do, and rotor is just
a way of making reading data mildly more of a PITA than XOR.  I don't
think even emacs has a decrypt-rotored-text function <0.5 wink>.


John