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Website, DB, & Software Developers

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IDemo

(16,926 posts)
Fri Jul 5, 2013, 11:11 AM Jul 2013

A question on an encryption method [View all]

And I'm not even sure that this would technically qualify as 'encryption', per se.

But if two or more parties wanted to secure their email contents from inspection (and I'm assuming plain text here), wouldn't the following system be virtually safe:

A large file is created with nothing more than random numbers in sequential order. Let's say the numbers can be any value from 0 to 999. Realizing that random numbers may not be as random as desired, we are still going to have a large list that will more than suffice for our needs.

Now, a program is created that will take plain text and execute a different operation on each character, referencing one or more of the numbers in our list. Let's say for example that our message begins with the letter 'A'. The executable picks the value at the 213th place of our list, 428, performs a math operation, say x = 1 * 428 * 15 (with 'A' equaling the 1 here) and writes the result into a text string. And onwards, with each successive character from the original text being used in a different operation with another number from the randomized table. The end result is what appears to be an entirely meaningless list of numbers.

The sequence of operations is compiled within the executable and can be used to decipher the message on the other end. Each of our parties is given the two files - the randomized number list and the executable.

I may be missing something here, but would this not represent a literally indecipherable method of encrypting a simple text-only email?

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