ubuntu: destroy a huge binary file and make it non-readable.

[Nandakumar]

OK, I understand. But I think even a simple cipher technique will be
enough for BINARY files.
(As a fun, I'll change the statement 'even the developer can't' to
'the developer can't' since I'm not so smarter to decrypt ;) But I'll
try to become smarter!)

On 1/26/14, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
> Nandakumar wrote:
>> >> I'd like to point out that the statement "even the developer can't
>> decrypt it" is meaningless.
>> The encryption algorithm simply depends on the key. The key is not
>> recorded while encryption too. The source code is also open. And if
>> you read it, you will understand that the only way to hack is trial
>> and error method. The success of encryption depends on the length and
>> strength of the key.
>
> Sorry, but I can't see the source code at the URLs you provided:
> <http://nandakumar.co.in/private/filedest> or
> <https://launchpad.net/gopanam/+download>. But maybe I'm missing
> something?
>
> Anyway, I don't dispute that the encryption works. But it doesn't matter
> if the key is recorded or not. If the output is not sufficiently random,
> there may be ways to decrypt it even without knowing the key.
>
> To explain why I criticize your statement, let's think of an example:
> If I would write an encryption program where I use the wellknown Caesar
> cipher (*), the output may be unreadable for me and any other normal
> person. Therefore I could state that "the developer can't decrypt the
> output without the key", but that doesn't mean that there aren't smarter
> people than me who easily decipher the output using some statistics and
> knowledge of character distribution in normal languages.
>
> As we don't know about the data the OP wants to "destroy", we don't know
> if the use of a simple encryption like my example might be good enough
> or if something better is needed. Therefore the statement that "I can't
> decrypt the output" does not necessarily mean that my program is useful,
> i.e. the statement is meaningless. And by pointing out that the
> statement is meaningless I merely wanted to give the OP a hint that this
> should not be a base for the decision to use the program.
>
>
> Nils
>
> (*) The Caesar cipher simply shifts the characters of the alphabet a
> fixed amount of places, which makes the new alphabet e.g.
> "cdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzab" instead of the normal sequence starting
> with "a".
>
>
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