13
I thought about this and done a bit of research and the answer is no.
The problem is the gap between the difficulty of factorisation versus prime generation isn't really large enough at the scale of primes/moduli we can work with.
By 1588 the largest prime discovered was 524287 and that was due to Pietro Cataldi. This was a prime generated by a single ...
13
There are techniques for doing online surveys on sensitive subjects. They don't follow the approach you outlined, but here's a sketch of how they work.
Suppose we want to survey people to determine how many people have ever seriously considered suicide (say), but we suspect many people might be unwilling to answer honestly because of the stigma associated ...
11
"Strong enough" is a broad term. Some things that you need to keep in mind are entropy size and cryptanalysis. "Strong ciphers" are ciphers that have shown to have enough entropy to withstand practical attacks over time from public scrutiny.
With that said, the Solitaire cipher has a keyspace of roughly 238 bits. By comparison, many SSL keys on the internet ...
9
One option would be to get them to select a one-time MAC of the form:
$mac(m,k_0, k_1) = (k_0 \times m + k_1) \mod p$
You would select $p$ to be something like 29. $k_0$ and $k_1$ would be chosen at random from the values 0-29. $k_0$ has the additional restriction that it can't be 0.
You can aid the computation by giving them a 29x29 matrix of all ...
9
This requirement is a killer:
The paper (or any medium other than the brain) must not at any time contain data that leaks information about the plaintext.
Almost any security proof for a hash assumes an adversary only gets to see digests, not any mid-state. Mid-state has not had enough confusion and diffusion, so it leaks information.
This means that ...
8
I like the didactic approach in this answer. But for something that behaves more like a hash function should, we might define $H$ for strings of digits $s$ as: $H(s)=(((1||s)\bmod 97)||s)\bmod 99991$ where $a||s$ is the number resulting from prepending the decimal representation of $a$ to the string $s$.
Worked out example for $H(012345678)$
$=(((1||...
8
Of course, it strongly depends on what exactly you mean when writing “casual person”. The cipher algorithm works similar to a shift cipher. As long as the attacker does not know the original order of the cards (of one or more decks of cards), then the cipher should be close to being unbreakable for a “casual person” – assuming that that casual person is ...
7
If you want to demonstrate the properties of a good cryptographically secure hash, you could start with a non-cryptographically secure hash, and show why collisions are bad, why reversibility is bad, and why allowing modifications is bad. Once they've learned the "bad", they should better understand why those properties make a cryptographic hash "good".
...
7
I still don't understand your desire for a hash, especially considering (as already stated at other places in this forum) that you don't gain any entropy by subjecting a PW
to a deterministic function like a hash. So, when decrypting your ciphertext, you will be as secure with a H(key) as with (key), thus you might as well just memorize a good long ...
7
You are not likely to find such a construction. One problem you will run in to is that of size: In order to be secure against brute force search with Grover's algorithm, you will need to use at least 200 bits of secret material. And that assumes you are content with a security level of $2^{100}$.
This is equal to 25 random bytes or a 60 digit long decimal ...
7
Probably the easiest way to do finite field multiplication by hand is using discrete logarithm and antilogarithm tables. For example, here's a pair of such tables for the AES field (using 3 as the base), generated using this Python code:
log| _0 _1 _2 _3 _4 _5 _6 _7 _8 _9 _A _B _C _D _E _F
---+------------------------------------------------
0_ | -- 00 19 ...
6
Check out Manuel Blum's human computable hash function. He calls it HCMU for Human Computable Machine Unbreakable.
He claims you have to spend an hour memorizing the technique and then you can apply the has function in about 20 seconds without even using pencil and paper.
The memorization required is to remember a random mapping of each letter of the ...
5
Perhaps you could do something with Visual Cryptography.
Maybe something like:
Gather a few low-resolution images (symbols or short text phrases), perhaps a few more images than you have kids
Use visual cryptography to split each image into 2 random-looking images, and print each random-looking image on its own piece of transparency paper
Shuffle the pile ...
5
You can try NSA's CryptoKids page (archived here). It's been around for some years and the ciphers have varying difficulty so you might at least get some ideas.
Alternatively you can use plain XOR encryption with a twist: Encrypt multiple consecutive letters with the same character. For example, if $|m|=n$ then $|k|=n/4$ and do $c_i,...c_{i+4}=k_i \oplus ...
5
Any set of $N$ distinguishable objects can be permuted in $N!$ different ways, thus giving you the ability to represent $N!$ different keys, resulting in a representable keylength of $\log_2(N!)$ bits. For $52$ distinguishable playing cards, this would be $\approx 225$ bits.
However with the additional property, that each object can have two distinguishable ...
4
No, there aren't any cryptographic hash functions like this. I'm pretty confident you're not going to find one. I have yet to see a white-box secure hash function that remains secure against dedicated attack, let alone one that you can implement securely on pencil and paper. Since this is a practical problem, I suggest finding another solution -- like ...
4
How about using something similar to Zobrist hashing and generate the look-up table by coin flips?
Let's say you want to commit to a 64-bit integer and you are able to deliver the look-up table in person and later communicate a 256-bit hash.
Flip the coin 256 x 64 times, with 2 seconds / flip it takes 9.1 hours so you might not want to do it every day :) ...
4
I don't think RC4-based constructs were mentioned yet, it would be fairly trivial to implement with a deck or two of playing cards or self-made cards. It has only modular sums and swaps, and only two state variables i and j :)
It is known to be weak but shouldn't be crackable without a calculator.
Edit: Yes, the message would be used to seed the cipher and ...
4
You can do RC4 using a 52-entry table, instead of a 256-entry table. All you do is change the modulo-256 arithmetic in RC4 to use modulo-52 arithmetic. There are no special changes needed, and no need to describe a special algorithm. If you want to see a description of how to perform it manually using a deck of cards, you can find that here: http://www....
4
The description isn't very clear but from what I understand it's a one time pad with a weird encoding of your input :
If you take and encoded input you know that every even position is either $0$, $1$ or $2$ and if it is $2$ then the subsequent digit is between $0$ and $5$.
That being said the whole security of your scheme relies on using a solid random ...
4
You could challenge them to devise low-tech, physical zero-knowledge proofs (of knowledge) for games like "Where's Waldo?" and Sudoku, then show them some methods that really work and why. I've done this before with high school CS students and they seemed to really like it.
For "Where's Waldo?" one can prepare a large sheet of paper (at least twice as big ...
4
A Michael Kjörling notes, what you basically have is a monographic substitution cipher. These are generally easy to crack using frequence analysis; for example, if we know that the underlying text is in English, we can be fairly sure that the two most frequently occurring symbols correspond to the letters T and E (and that any symbol that occurs unusually ...
4
Assuming that
we can encode information with:
the order of the cards;
which face is up;
rotation of cards by 180° as clearly distinguishable on a standard deck of cards as pictured below, that is for 7 of tile, and ace, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 of clover, heart, and spade;
that when "carrying" a deck of cards:
we keep the cards together so that relative ...
3
I'm answering to this a bit with "tongue in cheek" attitude because I like the question. Thanks d33tah. I try to make a few useful points. Maybe somebody contributes more via comments.
The term RSA in itself is ambiguous. I've assumed that entire RSA as defined in PKCS#1 + key generation stuff from FIPS 186-4 was known back then (maybe they also knew DSA ...
3
People have long used code systems for this purpose, instead of ciphers. With a code, you pre-establish entire messages. "John has a long mustache" might mean "sabotage the phone lines". Or the number of suits on the dry cleaning order might indicate the size of the enemy force.
Sometimes the codes are awkward, and give away the existence of the code ...
3
A self-shrinking LFSR can be implemented using nothing but a couple of decks of cards.
0 equals face down
1 equals face down.
You can then split the deck at each tap point and XOR the items in your head. After the XOR is done, you move the cards on to next split deck; this has the effect of shifting the register.
Key set-up is easy, each iteration is ...
2
The following simple "check" algorithms are popular for detecting accidental errors.
The following algorithms are "position sensitive", allowing them to detect the common error of accidentally swapping 2 consecutive digits (an error that a simple checksum -- adding up the digits -- can't detect).
In increasing order of complexity (and resistance to finding ...
2
Many of the beginner explanations use very simple examples:
like this
It is still hard to factorize a small number by hand, compared to other operations. There is definitely a size of prime numbers where hand computation is still feasible, but hand factorizing isn't. Would you, for instance, even armed with a list of primes, be able to quickly tell me what ...
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