Re: Recent Furore over ASCII presentation in Decimal form as being Standard.

On May 23, 2:09 pm, rossum <rossu...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2008 04:52:34 -0700 (PDT), AdaCrypt

<austein.oby...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Strictly speaking I should be using the hexadecimal
representation of ASCII and certainly not as suggested a binary
representation.

You may use any representation you wish.  Your computer will use a
binary represeantation because it is a binary computer.  Memory
locations hold binary.  Data stored on disk, CD or DVD is stored in
binary.  Data transmitted or recieved from other computers is in
binary.  To your computer everything is a pattern of binary 1s and 0s.

The representation used is irrelevant to the security of a cypher.
You say you are using 95 characters.  Then it is possible to turn any
string into a number in base-95 and then to convert than number into
any other base that is needed: base-2, base-10, base-16 or whatever.
Any string in one base can be transformed into an equivalent string in
another base.  An attacker can easily transform either cyphertext or
plaintext into whatever representation is easiest for her.

You are fixing on an irrelevant point here.  The number base
representation of a character, or of a piece of text, has no relevance
at all to the security or not of any proposed cypher.

rossum

Absolutely. It was my misfortune to mention anything about the
numerical value or base of numbers in the secondary representation of
alphanumeric data in that general aside that I should not with
hindsight have made. It was a complete irrelevence.The salient thing
here is that I do not use numbers by studious design and instead use
alphanumeric data. The keyboard, the computer and the program do the
rest once the plaintext is either read in or keyed in. I am replying
to other points outside of the cipher - Thanks - Adacrypt
.

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