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See also Solitaire, a cipher designed by Bruce Schneier to be applied by hand.

http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html



well, today encrypting the message within the deck is just not dense enough information wise.

why don't people just use a shuffled deck as a one time pad key for encrypted files? seems like a much better application of the idea.


How do you turn a shuffled deck into a key long enough to encrypt a file?


The obvious and totally impractical solution is to construct a look-up table between deck states and log2(52!) bit long strings.

I imagine there's a better algorithm, but it's clearly possible.


the order of the shuffled deck is 52!


A one time pad consumes as many bits as the message length. It has nothing to do with the bits of information that can theoretically be stored in a deck of cards.


use something like pi to create a number of specific length (twice as long as the file?) and permute it according to the card order?


One time pads need to be as long as the data they are encoding. They must not have any repeats. The pad has to be really random.

Thus the maximum length of the message is 54 chars (52 cards, 2 jokers).

And then you have the pad distribution problem - you need to get the pad from Ann to Bob. And the message needs to get from Ann to Bob. So are you using security by obscurity and hoping no-one notices the deck of cards is a OTP?




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