Practical Secret Protection

4 Provably Secure Secret Protection

It may be argued that neither of the above methods would be sufficient to protect extremely sensitive material. It could also be argued that with PSP, one would be lucky to neutralise[3] more than the first eavesdropper. Some sceptics might even think there is no message that could cause the reader such physiological harm they cease their eavesdropping immediately (not even spam?), although the work of Cleese et al. [4] is worth mentioning. However, it is possible for a sufficiently paranoid Alice (or Bob) to employ an extended version of PSP that provides guaranteed secrecy. There are two scenarios for using the system as such:

• It is not feasible or even possible to merely eliminate all potential eavesdroppers.

• The secret is of such high importance that no-one besides Alice and Bob may know it (not even a native of a hereto undiscovered South American rainforest tribe, who has no knowledge of Alice, Bob, the language they are communicating in, or even the most basic knowledge of how to break DES).

The modified system is this: Alice wants to send a secret to Bob. Alice kills everyone on the planet except Bob, and sends the message in clear. It should be noted that although this method could potentially involve 2^32.5 = 6,000,000,000 operations[4] this is significantly fewer than the 2⁵⁶ that are required to brute-force attack the simplest cipher known to man. Furthermore, these operations only need to be performed once . . . ever, after which Alice and Bob can communicate in perfect secrecy as often as is required. For time and resource efficient methods of reducing the world's population to 2, the reader is directed to the various works of Flemming([2],[3]), as well as a myriad of blockbuster films, comics, and Saturday morning cartoons.