-=> Quoting David Williams to Rick Pedley <=-
 DW> Of course, there's no harm in doing some other type of juggling too,
 DW> but I'm not sure that it actually adds much to the security of the
 DW> system. For practical purposes, XORing with RND-generated numbers would
 DW> be virtually impossible to crack, except maybe by someone at the
 DW> Pentagon who has a supercomputer to play with.
Once, because I happened to be teaching computer courses in a prison,
I was asked to look at a bunch of floppy disks confiscated from some
inmate, to see whether they contained any "secret" information. It
was an interesting exercise, in part because I had no idea what sort
of information I was looking for, and also because there are so many
ways to disguise information that don't really involve encryption. I
remember looking at directory listings with some third party utility
that showed all the file attributes in a row (S H A R), and speculating
that on a disk with many files, those attributes could be used to form
letters to be read from top to bottom of the listing, like:
 
S H A
S     R
S     R
S     R
S H A
S H A
S     R
S H A R
S   A
S     R
S     R
S     R
S     R
S     R
S     R
  H A
  
  H A
S     R
S
S   A R
S     R
  H A
  H A
S     R
S
  H A
      R
S     R
  H A
In the end I decided the disks contained only what they appeared to
contain, really poor quality girlie gifs :)
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