pavritch

7 ms·

1.
by pavritch 8y ago
I'm sorry, but my post said things worked out - not that they cracked the code. I was clear they wouldn't tell me anything. I had always assumed the mug was from the gift shop. It would be hard to think otherwise.
2.
by pavritch 8y ago
Here's how I looked at it -- they are 1000x smarter than me on matters of encryption. It was totally unlikely I knew something they didn't. At most, I saved them a few hours on a matter of life and death, and I had minutes to make
3.
by pavritch 8y ago
You're absolutely right...I forgot the time diff as I wrote the story and some is just plain fuzzy after all this time. I spent hours on the phone with them that night and I was giving them guidance by memory since I was so familiar wi
4.
by pavritch 8y ago
Yeah, makes sense. And I planned it all out even down to timing the post to hit last night after midnight before all the pipe bomb news this morning on TV. Or, much closer to reality, maybe I just wanted to see if I could write a post that
5.
by pavritch 8y ago
I did not roll my own. Very few people in the world are smart enough to do that. I just create a very nice user interface to make things easy for ordinary Windows users.
6.
by pavritch 8y ago
The only thing I did masterfully was write a Medium article that got some attention. I didn't even include a link to the old software which hasn't been updated in a decade. It's nothing more than an interesting story about on
7.
by pavritch 8y ago
Ha ha. We moved on years ago. Our conversations are now typically about the fact he as way more patents than me. I only have two ;)
8.
by pavritch 8y ago
Exactly. TrueCrypt was the big open source product at the time. A great product used by many hundreds of thousands of people -- I know, because I used to track their progress.
9.
by pavritch 8y ago
The laws were different back then. The State Dept changed the rules a decade or more ago, I forget when, and AES 256 has been the default cipher ever since. Encryption is listed as a munition. I would have gone to jail if I put anything gre
10.
by pavritch 8y ago
All commercial encryption software uses the same public ciphers. Do you really think nearly 20 years after the fact I'm trying to impress anyone? But, they were impressed at the time about my user interface which wrapped the ciphers, a
11.
by pavritch 8y ago
The ciphers are public. Providing source for this specific implementation of "user interface" did nothing more than indicate sizes of file headers, etc. No customers were put at risk. All I did was save the NSA maybe a few hours o
12.
by pavritch 8y ago
I'm not ashamed! The product was not broken. As others have correctly pointed out, there were export restrictions for public shareware downloads. The product is still sold and has never been reported to have been broken. The ciphers us
13.
by pavritch 8y ago
I'm the author. They found me on the firsts call. I have a unique name - the footprint was there. But, I had 5 relatives in the same town. Nobody else got a call. Were they just lucky?
14.
by pavritch 8y ago
The ciphers are public. What the NSA really wanted was the size of file headers, special markers, etc -- so they could skip over the fluff and home in on the juicy stuff. I gave up nothing that would put the product or users at risk.
15.
by pavritch 8y ago
I'm the author of the article. All common ciphers are available as open source already. I just packaged it into a product. Encryption done right does not suddenly become vulnerable if published to an open forum. I gave up nothing. I di