Re: [SAGE] Long lived, cheap data storage (securely)

[Philip Brown <phil@bolthole.com>]

Old thread, but thought I'd chime in a little...



On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 04:59:27PM -0400, Mark R. Lindsey wrote:
> But risks in this plan:
> 
> -> How long would GnuPG encryption last me? After all, single-DES was  
> considered useful once. What's the expected lifespan of readily- 
> available encryption software?

I think that no "public key" style encryption, is going to be secure for
more than 20 years, let alone 100.
(10, even?)

Anything that is reliant on math, to puzzle out a mathematical solution to
something.. will eventually be breakable.

I hear that one of the best solutions for encryption, for data of limited
length, is to pick a book, and then use the text as a cypher key.
Letter-for-letter cycling of keys, so to speak.
First byte of data, gets "encrypted" by first letter of book.
Second byte of data, gets "encrypted" by second letter of book. etc.

The problem with that, is that I dont know the ramification of what happens
when you have so much data, you have to keep recycling the book over it.