Decryption Notices: Home Office denials on Onus of Proof

[Richard Clayton]

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In article <4.1.19990730143438.0104aed0@pop3.symbian.com>, David Crookes
<david@crimbles.demon.co.uk> writes

>This provoked a memory. I have stored on my hard-disk bery old files that I
>encrypted but unfortunately have forgotten the key for. I can vaguely
>remember the key and so keep the file around on the off-chance I can be
>bothered to to write a cracker that tries obvious permutations of the my
>vague memory.

Indeed - on one of my drives I have some password protected ZIP files in
a similar state. I keep meaning to knock up a faster version of a ZIP
cracker, but it never seems to be a priority :)

I would not be surprised if this was a common situation for almost
everyone who has ever dabbled with cryptography.

In fact, we've all just been reading of yet another competition where
people are being encouraged to have files on their machines where the
whole point is that they do not have the keys to hand!

>How could we ever prove that this is the case?!

Telling all our friends about it "well in the past" might help influence
the jury :)

In fact, to that end I'd like to publicly state that I am extremely keen
on password cracking competitions and my memory is very poor. To that
end I have several hundred encrypted files on my hard disk that I am
completely unable to inspect....

> Would the Home Office
>believe the timestamp. I don't think so.

... bummer. I've had a lot of trouble with my clock recently, so quite a
lot of these files have timestamps that are well in future. In fact
quite a lot of them are in the week just before I get arrested for...

... but that's _not_ something to shout about in public yet :-)

- -- 
richard                       writing to inform and not as company policy
        only 25 MPs still need adopting:  http://www.stand.org.uk/
"Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind" quoted in ZAMM

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