Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping this might be an internet version of the old shortwave "numbers" stations [1] but now I see that there is likely a more mundane explanation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

View on HN

In an age of asymmetric public-key cryptography there would be very little to gain from number stations and a lot to lose.

OTPs and number stations can't be cracked mathematically and the channel is secure as long as the receiving end doesn't let the pad get into bad hands (this is achieved by compartmental communications and code words on top).

I would have thought that recent OpenSSL, SecureTransport and GnuTLS news would disprove your point. Not only that, we don't know what bad actors with unlimited resources can do with our communications if tapped.

So number stations and OTP are still viable and always will be.

With respect to numbers stations the transmission is centralised as well which means it's hard to break the channel infrastructure without crossing a border physically.

How does an operator reliably, repeatedly and securely use "asymmetric public-key cryptography" in an environment where the possession of a laptop is cause for suspicion?

The places that ban laptops love one-time pads...

"old"?, there are hundreds of ACTIVE numbers stations today: http://priyom.org/

I had just a bit of fun with it [1] but it's easy to see that no more that a few bits per frame can be accurately encoded this way.

[1]: http://jsfiddle.net/zenojevski/EHh3Q/4/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com