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Re: Whatever happend to compression?




Matt Holdrege/Ascend/US writes:
> A few thoughts.
> 
> In general, compression is nice in that it randomizes the data first, 
> then encryption further scrambles the bits making it harder for 
> anyone to make sense of it. It's another roadblock to the bad guy.

Any compression scheme you can reverse doesn't randomize the data in
any meaningful sense. The reason to want compression is to reduce
bandwidth, not for security.

> Compression should happen before encryption since compression
> works better on raw data than on encrypted data.

Compression should not work at all on encrypted data since encrypted
data should be essentially random to anyone without the key. That
implies incompressable.

Perry


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