Clive Robinson • August 22, 2020 1:20 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

News and Qs from the Burning Ring of Fire that is California.

Almost as an anticlimatical follow on,

A number of people hear now will have heard of,

EMP, HEMP, and CME events.

Which are very approximately caused by High Altitude Nuclear Detonation, Close in lightning strikes, and last but by no means least Solar flares. But very few understand why we should be concerned about them even though they are “technology killers” or as put by others more in the know about such events,

“Why worry we are gonna die”.

Well this tells you part of why,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ywZSdcAAKHU

That fatalistic view is held by quite a few engineers etc.

The simple fact is that whilst a handfull of decades ago when Congress were informed of the EMP issue an EMP would have put the US in a bad position with something like 50% of the population in towns and cities they could at least have “got out”. However due to technology it has since got a lot lot worse.

Almost entirely due to the “free market” mantras of neo liberals and neo cons infrastructure protection grants etc have been used for other things. Thus maintainance and needed upgrades have not happened and nearly every politician has kicked this tin can so far down the road that now estimates are that over nine out of ten US citizens would be dead within a month or two of a well executed EMP attack, that believe it or not would not actually constitute a primary act of war (as the event would be in “International Waters”)…

Interestingly though some areas of technology have advanced to where we are starting to actually get to the point where we as individial “families” could actually survive an EMP with some forethought (and considerable expense). But we are being handicapped in every which way imaginable by “the powers that be”…

That is the joke of it is though, it means taking as much technology as you can out of everytging. For example 1970’s cars and earlier are almost immune to EMP (though the starter motors and batteries might be nixed). However the supply of fuel will likely stop with the EMP event, not that this is insurmountable as WWII “gassifier” technology showed. ICE’s supprising to many will run quite happily on hydrogen gas, natural gas and town gas if you keep an eye on a few things like temprature. Diesel engines will even run unmodified on vegetable oils provided you add either a little petrol or alcohol to it. It’s the electronic ignition etc that will not function in modern cars as a friend pointed out even models a decade old this technology was “managable”. That is it was limited to modules that you could aford to buy a spare or two off and put them in suitable protection in your basement, though more recent models forget it, the desire by the powers that be to track your every movment means that all the technology has to be there and operational even though all telecoms will be out of commission almost indefinately…

Similar issues apply to “white goods” like fridges and freezers where the “Star rating” foe energy efficiency etc has made them not just less reliable but extreamly fragile. One well known “household name” found that it had to go around and change the microcontroller board in their fridge freezers under warranty because peoples homes were a little to warm or a little to cold…

Thus “the desire to collect it all” or “be efficient” has forced National Security to become way way more fragile than it should be. It’s an aspect of ICT Security you very very rarely if ever at all hear talked about…

Clive Robinson • August 23, 2020 5:43 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Closer to Krakatoa, the sound was well over this limit, producing a blast of high pressure air so powerful that it ruptured the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.

Krakatoa still beats anything mankind has so far built for being “loud” and “destructive” as far as overpressure goes[1].

But the “sound” these people talk of was the slow high loss propagation through air. What I was referering to was the much faster “ducted” thus constrained propagation through the earth’s crust[2].

If you think of the earths crust[3] as being like a “wine glass” it’s not hard to realise why some are worried about potential resonance in it[4].

[1] whilsit it did not “helped me feel good about the bomb” it did atleast increase my understand that “humans” are still playing “tiddly-winks” when compared to Mother Nature. Oh and that as far as Mother Nature was concerned Krakatoa was at most “crumbs off of the table” when compared to Super Volcanoes and large lumps of rock dropping in real quick and those so far safely distant Super Nova’s which can rightfully be called “extinction events”.

[2] As I’ve mentioned before such “ducted” conduction of energy has some odd properties. One of which is that the apparent wavelength changes the second is the high efficiency of propagation compaired to air or “free space”. Whilst optical fiber is a good visable example for EM energy, the much older “railway lines” example is better for sound. That is if you are standing on a quiet platform of an over ground railway, you can hear the rails “twitch and sing” from an approaching train long long before you can hear it through the air. This effect is not realy down to the low speed of sound in air but the difference between radiated and conducted energy levels. As most know radiated “power” drops off faster than 1/(r^2) but few realise that for conducted / ducted power in a uniform diameter conductor it’s 1/(r). Conducted in a thin shell around a sphear the power first drops of, but then goes up after it passes the meridian circumfrance and aproches the antipode[4] getting back a substantial fraction of the power.

[3] As far as we can tell the earth has a unique crust when it comes to planatary bodies in the solar system. Xenogeologists talk of three different time periods for crusts on planatary crusts “primary” being the original crust caused by cooling of the planatary body, of which the earth now does not have any. The “secondary” crust which is often basaltic and caused by melting effects in the underlying mantal and is the most common crust in the solar system and forms the earths “Ocianic crust”. And “tertiary” crust that forms the earth’s “continental crust” caused by the likes of errosion and melting effects in the secondary crust. It is thought that tertiary crustvis probably unique to earth as it appears to require plate techtonics and as far as we know this is unique to earth.

What may “fly in the face” of the wine glass resonance idea is that whilst most terrestrial planets in the solar system do have fairly uniform crusts. Earth, with it’s two distinct crust types (continental and oceanic) and plate techtonics is not uniform. Both crust types have different chemical compositions thus physical properties, as well as being formed by different geological processes, which might well stop the earth having aby significant spherical resonance ability, thus behaving like a series of “damped resonators” at best.

[4] One of the interesting things with resonators that have a focus point is what happens when you “stroke” them with a continuous motion at the right rate rather than a percussive tap. This is especially true in a spherical resonator that has to focus points and all paths are equidistant between them. Whilst the energy from any individual part of the stroke is small it is stored in the resonator thus as it approaches,the antipode the peak energy level can easily be destructively high. The energy of a wave front converging and passing over a sphere can have this property… Hence the “in theory claims” some have been making, lets hope for all our sakes theory and practice do not align with space weather as we might not get to realise what has happened as “the glass will have shattered” as the “fat lady sings”.

Clive Robinson • August 23, 2020 2:57 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

Urban dwellers tend to get COVID19 from shopping areas, churches, schools and other urban gathering spots.

And in the UK “the Blond Quiff MkII” who is desperatly trying to accumulate power is now trying the old “Uncle Tony” Blair technique of apointing crass, incompetent but importantly loyal Duning-Kruger types, who will cover up his “flip-flop” behaviours as he “U-Turns” or “Reverse Ferret’s” as he fails his way forwards.

His COVID-19 plan is still the indefensible “Herd Immunity Policy” of deliberately pushing the disease so it burns it’s way through the country as fast as possible, whilst shovelling as much money as possibble to the “Croney-Corps” such as Serco, Capita, Group Four, etc who “fail and defraud at arms length for 40%” and ensure the impoverished get pushed into no-PPE workplaces and the like…

In London and the South East we had started to get things under control finally by the very late measures of masks in public etc. Now Blond Quiff MkII wants to fully “open up” Schools, and adult gathering spots to give SARS-CoV-2 a nice new “soft ubderbelly” in the body of society…

That is both Schools and Social gatherings are long known to be what are now being called “Super spreader events” even though UK polititions tried to blaim anything and everyone else…

My prediction is there is going to be a very noticable increase in cases as the “children, and adolescents” going back to education in a couple of weeks will become “Granny Killers” by taking home COVID-19 and other leathal pathogens into their homes and infect elder family members. Likewise the adolescents and young adults will “catch and spread” from their “urban gathering spots” and similar, it’s unavoidable with “flesh upon flesh” contact aided by alcohol and the like as the nights draw in whilst staying warm enough for bare flesh.

I would not be at all surprised to hear one of the Blond Quiff MKII minnions having just thrown a serious spanner in the UK healthcare system, find a reason for not bothering with vaccines and national vaccination for “economic reasons”…

After all “wholesale slaughter of the old and impoverished” is turning out to be politically acceptable to those that are young or busy pushing Herd Immunity Policy and think they are immune… It’s turning into another Thatcher “Grabbing, shilling Society” that spawned the “Loads of Money Ethic” of the 1980’s that did so much harm.

Clive Robinson • August 23, 2020 5:26 PM

@ Who?,

Beware of bad cabling!

The problem is a very old one and whilst understood by Communications Design Engineers, your average Networking “line walker” may never hsve heard of the issue…

The oldest example that is so old even it’s grandchildren have white beards is the from First World War and earlier “Field Telephoned” (especially those that used “phantom circuit “wiring).

It’s told as a form of joke,

The forward officer on seeing sight of the enemy approaching calls the command post and says,

Send reinforcements I’m going to advance.

Which is heard by the command post opperator as,

Send three and four pence I’m going to a dance.

Droll and vaguely ammusing it gets a point over about low level signals and cross talk much of which is caused by “poor connections”. By poor connections it’s not realy using it in the colloquial way it is today by the majority, they realy do mean a poor connection in a plug or socket or punch down (IDC) terninal block. Where due to mechanical vibration, dirt or chemicals in the air the electrical connection goes from a low impedence low noise conection to a high impedence high noise connection that as part of a twisted pair causes pair imbalance thus very much increased suceptability to “cross talk” from adjacent also poorly balanced signal pairs.

In analogue systems which all communications are fundamentally you hear engineers talk of Signal to Noise Ratio SNR, log(Eb/No) and in some cases SINAD which include distortion caused by line amplifiers and the like trying to compensate for low signal levels. In a digital system the analogue signal goes into a “digitizer” such as a zero crossing detector, window detector, limiter or slicer to convert it into a digital signal. This hides the low signal level, high noise, distortion, and cross talk as “edge jitter” and “bit flipping” when reclocking or re-timing is applied to get rid of “edge jitter” that too can end up in “bit fliping” (the energy has to go somewhere). Which is these days usually measured / indicated as “Bit Error Rate”(BER). Thus it’s not unusuall to hear communications engineers talking about the BER for a given Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).

BER has been well known about –though not under that name– from before WWI in “telegraph” and “Teletype” systems some of which go back into the late Victorian era. It eventually gave rise to “Error Correction Codes”(ECC). Before that though the errors had to be detected, the earliest of which most people have heard of but do not realise what it is for is “Parity Bits” you see in the likes of serial communications where modems were set to the likes of “5E1.5”, “7O1” or later “8N1” where the first number indicates the number of data bits the letter in the middle (OEN) was for Odd/Even/No parity and the last number the number of “stop bits”. Thus all odd numbers of bit flip errors could be detected, but not even numbers of bit flips. Which is very important to remember “some errors still get through” thus need to be detected further up the comms stack.

If you’ve read Cliford Stoll “Cuckoo’s Egg” you might remember that he exploited this by simple “Fault Injection” by the process of jangling a bunch of keys across the analogue telephone pair terminal block of the dial in modem. The person at the other end would see increasing levels of data errors which back then were a quite common event for various reasons esspecially on International phone links.

As data became “packitized” to increase “bandwidth efficient” then error detection became very much more important and we got not just parity bits on individual characters but also the mathmatical addittion of all the characters as “Checksums” whilst these improved error detection they did nothing for “error correction”, it was pointless having increased bandwidth efficiency by packitization if you lost it agaon by having to re-transmit data packets for a single bit error. Thus actual error correction became important and true ECC’s were developed which included the likes of Hamming, Reed-Solomon and trellis codes are the most well known. But even these codes fail at very low Eb/No levels as used in satellite communications. Thus the use of redundance where extra error corecting information is transmitted these are known as “Forward Error Correction”(FEC) codes.

Unfortunately as real error correction by Hamming Reed-Solomon etc is “expensive” in one way or another and only needed for the lowest of base analogue signal levels Ethernet only uses partial “error detection” via check sums.

Thus whilst many “bit flip errors” are detected in an Ethernet network they are not corrected and some slip through to create errors in higher levels of the communications level protocols (ie further up the comms/network stack).

This idea of “layered protocols” is common but unfortunatly it alows gaps to be inedvertantly created which can and unfortunately does cause vulnerabilities in “error correction protocols”

I’ve warned in the past several times with exanples on this blog how issues in “error corection” alows error correction protocols to be abused and open up a covert channel to get information in through even assumed “one way, output only” devices such as “data diodes” and data sluices.

This “packet in a packet” idea is just a variation on this idea to push an attack backwards through protective measures.

What Armis Labs has done is,

1, Exploit a natural “Fault Injection” attack.

2, To leverage an “Error Correction mechanism Fault”.

Both are “known classes of vulnerability” which I’ve talked about on this blog for some years now. And what they have done is combined them to come up with a “new instance” of attack in those classes of vulnerability. So it’s an “Unknown Known” or “Black Swan” attack.

I now expect there to be varients of this attack to be fairly quickly found and possibly published as there is one heck of a lot of “wriggle room” in both the known classes of vulnerability it uses.

Whilst few appreciate or even understand “Fault Injection” attacks be the natural/inherent or active they are nevertheless very powerfull attacks with very devistating results. Likewise “Error Correction Fault” attacks are very powerfull and barely understood by most. This is because of the way humans tend to think, after all the reasoning is “it’s an output” why expect it to be used in reverse as an input, or convay an attack packet through a firewall and other detection and protection systems by “wrapping it up” thus making it “A wolf in sheeps clothing” or to use an older Greek warning “A Trojan Horse”…

Clive Robinson • August 24, 2020 5:23 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, MarkH, ALL,

COVID-19 second infection in same person.

Yes it was something I was waiting to happen with some trepidation.

Even though there have been indicators that asymptomatic sufferers may well have got immunity from another CoV of potentially animal origin (yes having pets when children are young can help build a childs immune system).

However lurking in the back of my mind has been dengue fever and just how harmful that can be on a second infection due to a varient.

Hence your comment,

If the research is confirmed, this is Bad News for targets of Herd Immunity Policy

Is what scares me.

But even though I know you should never draw a hypothesis let alone a conclusion on a single case, I nevertheless hope that his asymptomatic response to the second infection is going to be indicative for everyone.

Whilst it’s currently to early to tell there may well be others[1] in fact logic implies that now we have observed one case there are other cases that we have either missed or have yet to see.

Thus if it’s found that subsequent infection is primarily asymptomatic then we would expect R₀ to rise.

However those fond of the “Herd Immunity Policy” are apparently “linear thinkers” and no more understand exponential decay than they do exponetial rise. As the number of people that have become infected in any population increases the rate of infection drops, but importantly may not stop. In fact you would expect it to “stutter”. That is new uninfected people are born every day thus the uninfected population rises untill they meet an infectious agent which causes a fresh outbreak. Thus in effect there is a threashold at which the infection rate increases untill the ratio of infected to uninfected again causes exponential decay where upon the near linear increase in uninfected rises again and the new threshold is reached and infections rise again. The only thing stopping such a perpetual cycle is to eliminate the virus. Which as the case of “human to mink to human” demonstrates is now unlikely to happen, we can have zoonotic reservoirs acting as embers to start new flames.

[1] There is a saying that “The only numbers that realy make sense are none, one and infinity”. The implication being something does not exist, is unique or there’s an unknown number of them”. Set theory kind of says the same thing and in a way the fundemental law of natural numbers “The successor function”

Clive Robinson • August 25, 2020 4:09 AM

@ MarkH,

We know for a fact that vaccination can bring viruses to extinction

Yes as long as it does not escape from some lab where it’s still being kept for “research”.

But the necessary first step is of course having a safe and efficacious vaccine, and that is very far from certain.

Some vaccines cary a risk of about one in 12,500 people will suffer sideffects including death and longterm incapacity.

It appears that with first world healthcare the case fatality rate from covid has dropped from above 6% to less than 0.25% and is still dropping[1]. But more importantly it apprars only one in ten are actually comming to the attention of the medical proffession. Thus that 0.25% is more likely to be now 0.025% or less or something like 1 in 4000 or better, which is getting quite close to that 1 in 12,500 that is felt acceptable for some vaccines. Only time will tell about sequeli, but with systemic organ failure as part of the symptoms it would be reasonable to assume there will be more than lung damage and damaged immune systems in some peoples futures.

Thus like you,

though whether it will in the case of SARS-CoV-2 I have no idea.

I’m aware that a vaccine may not happen in my lifetime if at all. After all there are four CoV that do the rounds in humans and as the quip has it “Nobodies come up with a cure for the common cold”.

But whilst we can not stop you geting a CoV common cold, we now know enough about it to reduce it’s effects on those suceptable to a point where in our corporate view point a vaccine will not be a good idea… This is because more profit is made on remidies thus comming up with a vaccine that gets rid of the common cold would be adverse for profits… The only reason they bother with flu is that mutates so rapidly it’s unlikely an eradicating vaccine will be developed thus big Phama get the best of both in that it gets a steady profit stream on both vaccines and remedies…

[1] This drop may not be entirely due to healthcare. As with anything novel, you will have a wide range of suceptability and those that are most suceptable will normally get “winnowed out” first that is what natural herd immunity brings you. How long this winnowing out takes is of course mathmaticaly infinite but exponentialy decreasing. The reality is you eventually reach a sort of steady state with newly susceptable members of the population being born all the time, you get a stutering effect where the numbers are sufficient for a flare up to happen and die back. In practice it will not be to disimilar to that we see with some seasonal infections.

Clive Robinson • August 26, 2020 2:07 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

The article has a currious and key paragraph,

“With tens of millions of dollars flowing in, both races are expected to be competitive, and the two parties are seeking every opportunity for an advantage.”

Firstly this is nothing but a gruby greed fest sponsored by unknown persons in an illegal way.

Secondly note how it says “two parties” even though it’s actually about “three parties”…

The US needs not just less money in politics it needs way way way more independent accounting, monitoring and above all transparency to those who vote. After all they should be entitled to know what low life sleeze balls are being courted for cash in that less than subtal whoring of campain financing and legislation buying / influance peddling.

Clive Robinson • August 26, 2020 5:02 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

Well nothing particularly earth shattering happened in my part of the world but there were earthquakes all over elsewhere. These are pretty normal afaik.

In a way we were lucky or more precisely not as unlucky as we could have been.

NASA and others had calculated the odds of being hit by the CME at various points from it’s solar flare being detected. But like “butterflies in Brazil” or where ever it’s supposed to be we do not know which one is going to cause the chaos or not. So we can only make an informed guess as to what will happen or more correctly might happen.

The CME was large and we knew fairly quickly we were not going to get it full on but to one side. Thus the questions of “how far off?” and “at what orientation?” came into play.

As I indicated some where predicting “no event” whilst others “Oh my God we will be crushed”. The thing to remember as I indicated is that the Earth realy is a very small target and even though massive in expanse relative to the size of the Earth the CME “mass” is not a big bullet when it gets out this far. Thus the odds of being hit let alone hard hit are realy not that big.

As it turns out as far as I can tell we did get sort of hit but it was from the quite dispersed edge. Thus bot a lot happened other than a little more light up in the sky.

The problem is CME’s like volcanoes erupting or large rocks/snowballs dropping out of the sky have quite a range even on a logrithmic scale. With the “when” a good less predictable than the mean.

Thus all though we can say, “there’s one on it’s way”, we actually can not say very much about it untill it’s too late to take precautions.

So all we can do is flag up a warning for people saying “take precautions if you wish too”.

Thankfully we are general wrong so we tend only to take minimal precautions.

In my case it was disconnect the antennas and power cables screw on the “dust cap” shorts and drop the kit in it’s metal boxes lock down the lids, then do the food/water checks those in tornado ally do, then go sit down with a nice hot cup of tea and wait for the all clear.

I do similar when stormy weather and lightning is likely to happen. When you’ve previously lost kit worth about the equivalent of 50,000USD in todays money you tend to keep more of a weather eye open.

Mind you whilst I know I can prepare for very high voltages, current is rather a different animal. EMP’s tend to be fast and high voltage, whilst CME’s are more likely to be slow and high current and IR heating is more of a problem than most realise.

Clive Robinson • August 27, 2020 3:28 AM

@ Sherman Jay,

voltage/current and Infrared Heating

The expresion “IR heating” is context sensitive. When talking of Voltage (V) current (I) and power (P) it referes to the power caused by a current in a resistor (R).

Thus from Ohms Law (V=IR) and basic electrical power law (P=IV) you get a couple of basic formular. The easiest is to substitute Ohms law into the power law to replace V,

P=I.V, =I.(I.R), =I².R

Which as “Eye squared Are” is a bit of a mouthfull just gets called “IR heating”.

You will note there is no requirment for an alternating current (AC) component. However Infrared heating is a small part of electromagnetic (EM) heating which is all about the AC. EM heating is part of something called diathermy[1] or dialectric heating and works from about 13MHz in the middle of the HF band upwards. ~2.5GHz is where your microwave oven works as that is a good frequency for “-O-H” molecule tails to vibrate at you find a lot of them hanging off of organic molecules like “fat” and water –which is effectively two of them– so most food gets hot fairly quickly (the white of eggs is low in OH compared to the yolk which is why “whole eggs” go pop fairly vigourously in microwaves). The main trade off with EM heating is “wavelength -v- heating depth” the higher the frequency the smaller the wavelength which is good for mechanical construction, however it’s also a lot less heating depth, by the time you get up to infrared frequencies it’s the same as it is in a conventional gas/electric oven.

[1] Diathermy is derived from Greek and means “Heating through” the implication being it can cross “free space” via Electromagnetic Radiation which is most definitely an AC effect.

Clive Robinson • August 27, 2020 4:07 AM

@ Sherman Jay,

I have been searching and couldn’t find any info on whether, and how deep, underground storage (sealed from exposure) would protect electronics.

Yes being underground does improve things, but “how deep” is extreamly variable. The place you will find most information is discussions on antennas.

This is because the ground acts like a mirror and reflects EM radiation, which is why we can have effective quater wave vertical antennas (all antennas need to be a halfwave or multiple to come to resonance thus the ground provides a reflection of the quaterwave making it effectively a center fed halfwave dipole).

Dry sand is realy little different to glass which is what the bulk of most soils are. The more minerals and organic matter it has in it the better it reflects (thus screens) the ideal being quite salty water which is why many “Ham Radio” operators like to operate near large bodies of water.

In the UK and Europe much of which is part of the “northern deciduous band” there is a lot of leaf and other vegitation matter in the top soik which traps water and minerals and alows the formation of clay soils that trap water even more effectively. It’s normall in the UK and Europevto bury mains power and telecommunications cables in the ground by two or more feet which due to the soil conditions does provide a good degree of isolation to EM signals.

But… An EMP burst and to a lesser degree CME event provides vertical movment of charged particles which tend to penetrate and be absorbed more than they do reflected. I’m aware that real world EMP research has been done, however as far as I’m aware much of the detailed information is still classified.

Thus to find out how effective the soil in your area is you would need to do some ground conductance tests as a starting point then move to other tests[1]. Altetnatively work on the theory that 5ft of deciduous forest floor type soil provided it’s near water saturation should be adequate. Alternatively down the bottom of a copper or silver mine might be a good storage place if you can stop the damp and corrosion.

[1] There is a delightfull story of people using long wave radio’s back in the 1960’s tuned to the then 200kHz BBC signal from Droitwich in the UK Midlands and digging a “test hole” and putting a radio in the bottom and when they could nolonger detect the signal they assumed they were “deep enough” for the coverage on their “bomb shelter”…

Clive Robinson • August 27, 2020 4:56 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

In the Avian Carrier case, the data ‘in flight’ may end up becoming data ‘at rest’, due to issues beyond control of the carrier.

“There thum damn War Hawks gets themselves everywhere” 😉

So with a pigeon there is no real fall back it either arives “sometime” or it gets found as a skeleton in somebodies chimny in leafy Surrey seventy years later perhaps oddly by a Mr Martin[1].

Which brings us around to,

My thought being, any cryptography applied to a chunk of data, should *NOT* take into consideration whether the data is ‘at rest’ or is ‘in flight’.

When you think about it the mode of carrying the data should not impact the design of the data security unless it impacts the method of carrying (a pigeon could not carry an enigma machine but a Spitfire aircraft would hardly notice).

With modern electronics your design is thus dependent on the information theoretic security and time.

Information theoretic security is quite often “a bit iffy” with new attack methods making what was previously thought to be secure now less if not totaly insecure way faster than the expected improvments in computing power (see history of WiFi security).

But time is a human issue and contracts in normal use such as mortgages are 25years but property leases in the 1000-10000 years are rather more common than people might think (Guiness Brewery in Ireland being but one). One a more practical side, whilst I do not expect modern smart meters to last the old electromechanical meters could be 50years in service, which would imply a security requirment of atleast twice that long or a hundred years. Likewise for “Sealed Public Office Records” giving you 200 years.

So working on a blanket 1000 years secure time frame would be a starting point.

If you look back on this blog you will find discussions between myself and @Nick P about “chaining ciphers” because of the “unexpected break” issue. The idea being you use two or more encryption algorithms in series with the designs of the algorithms being “orthagonal” with respect to each other.

I’ve seen very little work on this subject but it’s a place where I would advise people to start looking.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2226203/Skeleton-hero-World-War-II-carrier-pigeon-chimney-secret-coded-message-attached-leg.html

Clive Robinson • August 27, 2020 3:41 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, myliit, ALL,

A little more on the CME that missed us a few days back,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CnNpWD5UzVs

We kind of got lucky in that it mainly went south and east of us, but the auroral increase was worth it for some.

Also the ISS crew managed to catch some freshly launched satellites as thy went just over the auroral zone. If the CME had hit it would have been a significant event and those newly launched satellites could have been in trouble.

Clive Robinson • August 28, 2020 1:32 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

“Food habits developed during this period, particularly the intake of ultraprocessed foods, represent a major health risk.”

That will be good news to Boris Johnson, now it’s starting to look like SARS-CoV-2 is not the “super killer” of “The bank of mum and dad”, thus nolonger going to solve all his economic woes by freeing up a third of the UK’s held assets and slashing his state pension bill by 90%.

That said, I’ve had the time to be more creative in my cooking habits and have not just lost weight but got better control on some of my medical issues.

I suspect the detrimental “Food habits” have happened for two reasons,

1, Increasing mental health issues in some who can not deal with “lockdown” for various reasons.

2, The lack of mobility and work causing the mind to look for satisfaction in other areas such as taste.

Fast food, Microwave Meals and the like tend to view 75% sugar “ketchup” as one of peoples “five a day” and salt as a flavour balancer along with monosodium glutamate and carcnogenic liquid smoke etc. All of which have been shown via Fast MRI to light up the same parts of the brain as addictive substances.

If the two “blond quiffs” want to get some kind of economic churn to make them look credible, than “deaths of asset holders are a necessity”, as are those who draw down on the tax take the quiffs need to buy off their “friends”…