[MUD-Dev] strong encryption for authentication

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Travis Casey wrote:

> No, I don't know that as well as you do, apparently.  In my
> experience, people on multiplayer games often go to private rooms
> in those games to conspire, have mudsex, talk about their
> real-life problems, and do other chatting that they would probably
> not like to have other people overhearing; indeed, the fact that
> they don't want others overhearing it is *why* they go to a
> private room.

However, if you tell them that your "lines" are secure, then they
are bloody likely to do even more of it and hold you liable if the
system is hacked :).

I can see how encryption to protect against packet sniffing makes
sense in dormitories, but that is probably one of the few situations
where it actually matters. Youth-logic: "If it is easy to do and
non-traceable then it is legal".

(Side note: people who have good reason to protect their privacy
publish the intimate details of their lives as autobiographies or
magazine articles...)

> I would argue that it does not -- or at least, it only does if
> *everyone* is using poor protocols.  The end user can still see
> the amount of traffic going back and forth, even if he/she cannot
> *read* that traffic.  Indeed, since encryption generally makes
> data larger, it creates a *stronger* need to write an efficient
> protocol.

Why does encryption in general make data larger?  It may increase
the entropy, and thus make compression harder for a general
compressor, but I can't see why it should make data significantly
larger.  The simplest of all schemes, XOR-with-noise, does not add
to the data length at all, but does of course make compression
(near) impossible.

--
Ola  -  http://www.notam.uio.no/~olagr/

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