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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Cryptography is specialized (and counterintuitive) enough that perhaps we should just let people who know what they're talking about respond rather than repeating or just making up what "feels right" to our lay interpretations of incredibly complex topics.

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I know what I am talking about: above poster is correct.

Proper encryption, maximum compression, and random bytes are all indistinguishable, as they have maximum entropy.

I only failed 9th grade three times, so feel free to correct me.

It’s a tough grade.

> are all indistinguishable,

without additional information!

I can prove to you that you're seeing an encrypted message by giving you the decryption key, and I can prove to you that you're seeing compression by giving you the decompression algorithm.

However, there is no way to prove that random bytes are _really_ random.

>However, there is no way to prove that random bytes are _really_ random.

well of course, because the opposite is true, any string of bytes can by XOR'd to something meaningful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

What we have been taught or what we understand about cryptography is just as important to discuss. What you said sounds a bit like "let the adults talk" and is condescending.

“20 years of abstinence-only cryptography education hasn’t gotten us anything but an endless supply of bad crypto in production systems”

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