davidwr's Journal: Combining public-key and one-time pads

Thanks to quantum computing, public-key encryption will be breakable in a matter of years, a decade or two on the outside.

One-time pads are inherently secure, but they are a pain since the pad itself has to be transferred securely.

A solution is to take a common, everyday data source, slice-and-dice and compress it, and use the result as the one-time pad. Transmit the instructions using public-key cryptography or using a different one-time pad.

Examples of everyday data sources include meteorological data, newspapers, literature, government publications, software releases, etc.

Decryption instructions can be as simple as:

Take the SuSE Linux 10.0 English CD set, append the ISO files in numerical order, strip off the first 100 bytes, compress it, and swap every 10th byte with the next-higher byte.

Transmit this instruction - which is less than a few hundred bytes - using any available secure channel.