Re: The enormous potential that programming LaTeX in Ada presents.

[Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 02 Dec 2014 03:57:04 -0800, Austin Obyrne wrote:

> Latex is a typesetting language that can be encrypted by an Ada program
> and then securely decrypted back to its LaTeX input file format at the
> receiving end.

A competent encryption / decryption system can encrypt and decrypt any 
stream of data, which is to say any arbitrarily long sequence of bits, in 
other words any file.

The format of the input file should be irrelevant, if the format of the 
input file is not irrelevant the first attack vector is that you know 
that the decrypted data has a specific format, and you look for clues in 
the ciphertext that might relate to the format of the input file.

So, it should not matter whether your plaintext is 7 bit ascii, a 
picture, a compressed zip archive of the cia's darkest secrets or Malia 
Obamas twitter account, if you run these through a good encryption 
algorithm an attacker should be unable to tell, even in possession of the 
encryption and decryption algorithms, what the format of the source data 
was, or even how long it was (but it's reasonable to deduce it's no 
longer than the ciphertext).

You seem convinced that your technique is in some way much more 
inherently secure than anything that has gone before. This presumes that 
there is some flaw in all that has gone before that you can not only 
prove mathematically, but can prove by demonstrating an infallible attack 
on the ciphertext to generate the plaintext.

If this is indeed the case, I am sure there are many publications 
queueing up to publish your paper demonstrating the fallibility of 
currently adopted encryption systems. Perhaps instead of trying to invent 
a totally new encryption method, you should concentrate on alerting 
people to the flaws in the existing system, and then you could present 
your system as the solution to the problem when asked "ok, you've proved 
the current algorithms are broken, how do we fix them?"

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon@gmail.com