http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/17/2310226

The Ultimate Weapon Against Censorship?

Posted by Hemos

on Sunday June 18, @04:08AM

from the interesting-idea dept.

Erik Moeller writes
"David Madore, mathematician at ENS, describes a method that might be the ultimate weapon in the battle against Internet censorship. In his paper A method of free speech on the Internet: random pads he introduces a system of so-called pads, chunks of random data that are used to encrypt controversial information.

Every byte in the source file is XOR'd with exactly one byte in the random file. The result file, by itself, is totally indistinguishable from white noise, provided that the pad used is truly random. Madore now suggests that users store pads on different servers and use several of them in combination to encrypt data.

A FTP or WWW site that stores one of the pads could argue that they are only storing random noise, and another might do the same. It would be mathematically impossible to prove them guilty of storing illegal information (unless there is a way to prove that one pad was created after the other). Only by the combination of the two (or more) files I am able to retrieve the original controversial information. The critical parts are the links to the pads I need to obtain the information, but those might be traded on a distributed system like Gnutella or FreeNet. Plus links take very little space and can be relocated easily to freespace ISPs.

The concept is a little more complicated than my summary here, so please read the paper (and mirror it, it's GPL'd!). There are already scripts and programs to create pads and restore the original files (including a GUI program for Win32). I might add that the idea of pad encryption is fairly old, already used in WWII -- its advantage is that it is mathematically safe if the pads are truly random and only used once, thus its name "One Time Pad"."

kokhaviv publications > NewCatch > countercens