[MUD-Dev] strong encryption for authentication

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 09:39:12 -0600 (MDT), Fred Clift
<fclift at verio.net> wrote:

> Anyone working on something like this?

I thought about this at great length, and then it occurred to me:

It's a GAME.

Why the hell would you want to encrypt it?

Basically, I started thinking about all the people this would lock
out of the game. People who didn't have the right encryption. People
who didn't understand encryption. People who didn't like
encryption. And no matter how much thought I put into it, I could
not think of one single reason why people would give two tin shits
in a wicker basket whether the game was encrypted. Nothing made
sense. I came up with all sorts of concerns about privacy and
security which, when you came right down to it, really didn't
*matter* on a game. For a business conference, yeah, I could see
that making sense. But it's a GAME.

I did have a distinct problem with *forcing* people to send
passwords in the clear, so I devised an optional cookie-based OTP
scheme for that.  But beyond that, I couldn't see any legitimate
justification for wasting the CPU power necessary to encrypt
EVERYTHING.

So I'd pose this question, to which I would honestly like to hear
the answer: what *possible* reason have you identified as a
compelling justification for encryption? Because I really couldn't
think of anything. Did I miss something?

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