Gideon Writes

In blasting front page headlines, the Wall Street Journal today (March 24, 2014) exposes the alarming state of blindness towards Russia, China and other protagonists in our unending cyber-war. It’s not as easy as eyeing Aunt Rosy’s Facebook page and stealing her phonelog. The Russians are masters, they use well simple robust tools that we are too lazy, to sophisticated to appreciate.  In stealing the secret of the Atom Stalin spies used “One Time Pad” encryption, invented in the US, and ignored by the US, because it’s too tedious to apply. Alas, until today we can’t crack the Russian communications from that era because “One Time Pad” tedious and all, is uncrackable, as Claude Shannon has brilliantly proved.  Similarly, they deny the US any intelligence regarding the intensity of communication. Normally one would expect to pick up preparations for a military operation like recently in Crimea but none was picked.  The Russians mask the intensity of their communication by maintaining a fixed intensity of bit flow. If they say nothing, all these bits a noise, random, meaningless. If they do say anything it is embedded in the random flow, but does not change the bit rate so we are not the wiser. “It’s too hard to use” was the response that we got when we offered a similar protection here.  One fears that a massive amount of mishaps lay unexposed behind all those curtains of secrecy. When cyber war failings come to the surface like today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal — the real scope of the problem deserves more attention than a short lived blog posting.