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Step 8Conclusion (and a few words of advice)
If you've been patient enough to read through this Instructable and go at least through one round of keystream-value generation, you should be much more familiar, if not completely at ease with the concepts of plaintext, ciphertext and modular arithmetics. Let us not leave without a few words of caution though.
Never, never use the same deck arrangement twice for two different messages. I won't delve into mathematical details here (for this, you should once again check Mr Schneier's original Solitaire page) but a professional cryptographer obtaining two or several messages encrypted with the same deck could easily deduce the keystream values, and decrypt your messages from there.
Don't be lazy and skip the 6 shufflings in the beginning of the process. Would you leave your appartment with your door unlocked when you could have actually locked it ? I thought so. Just do the shuffling :)
If possible, train at generating keystreams before actually having to use Solitaire. This will reduce the risk for errors - which are quite irreversible - as well as help you encrypt your messages faster.
Do as many things as possible in your head, not on paper nor on a computer terminal - granted you can do it without mistakes, that is. For that, you'll need to learn or train in mnemonics, but if the situation calls for such drastic measures, it's worth it.
Once you've finished generating keystream values shuffle your deck a number of times to make the initial deck impossible to retrace. Solitaire is reversible if someone puts their hand on the initial deck, and you do not want this to happen, do you ? Besides, as was said before, you must have written down/saved/memorized the initial deck somewhere (or made a backup deck).
Did I mention never using the same deck arrangement twice ? ;) Alright then, class dismissed ! Enjoy your privacy.
If you notice ANY mistake in this Instructable, make sure to send me a message so I can correct it as soon as possible ! For more details on the mathematics of Solitaire and more advice from Mr. Schneier, visit the original Solitaire webpage as well as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher) the Wikipedia article] dedicated to this cipher.
And finally, thanks to messieurs BlueScreenJunky and Scribe for their help and proofreading !
Never, never use the same deck arrangement twice for two different messages. I won't delve into mathematical details here (for this, you should once again check Mr Schneier's original Solitaire page) but a professional cryptographer obtaining two or several messages encrypted with the same deck could easily deduce the keystream values, and decrypt your messages from there.
Don't be lazy and skip the 6 shufflings in the beginning of the process. Would you leave your appartment with your door unlocked when you could have actually locked it ? I thought so. Just do the shuffling :)
If possible, train at generating keystreams before actually having to use Solitaire. This will reduce the risk for errors - which are quite irreversible - as well as help you encrypt your messages faster.
Do as many things as possible in your head, not on paper nor on a computer terminal - granted you can do it without mistakes, that is. For that, you'll need to learn or train in mnemonics, but if the situation calls for such drastic measures, it's worth it.
Once you've finished generating keystream values shuffle your deck a number of times to make the initial deck impossible to retrace. Solitaire is reversible if someone puts their hand on the initial deck, and you do not want this to happen, do you ? Besides, as was said before, you must have written down/saved/memorized the initial deck somewhere (or made a backup deck).
Did I mention never using the same deck arrangement twice ? ;) Alright then, class dismissed ! Enjoy your privacy.
If you notice ANY mistake in this Instructable, make sure to send me a message so I can correct it as soon as possible ! For more details on the mathematics of Solitaire and more advice from Mr. Schneier, visit the original Solitaire webpage as well as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher) the Wikipedia article] dedicated to this cipher.
And finally, thanks to messieurs BlueScreenJunky and Scribe for their help and proofreading !
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