Hiding code from intruders, a different slant on an old question

[alister]

On Thu, 08 Oct 2015 08:44:43 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 6:01 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber
> <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 7 Oct 2015 13:05:07 +0000 (UTC), alister
>> <alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> declaimed the following:
>>
>>
>>>With a simple Cesar the method is "shift the alphabet by 'X' characters
>>>and X is the key
>>>
>>>if the key is unknown then the attacker still has to brute force the
>>>method (admittedly with only 25 options this is not difficult)
>>
>>         But who'd consider that with just one-case and alphabet only...
>>
>>         At the least include upper, lower, numbers, and basic
>>         punctuation --
>> that will add a few more cycles of computation time to break <G>
> 
> It doesn't really matter how much you add; any Caesar cipher is going to
> fall easily to just a little bit of frequency analysis. Consider an
> extreme case, where the range of X is the size of the entire Unicode
> character set. If the message is written in a Latin-based character set,
> chances are good that the majority of the characters will fall within a
> range of <96, giving the attacker a great starting point to brute-force
> from.

Oh please
the Caesar cypher was mentioned as a simplification for the purpose of 
demonstration.
it was not intended to be even a remotely serious suggestion

which I am sure at least Denis understood when he posted his tongue in 
cheek reply.


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