Homeland Insecurity 10024

I'm quite sure that anyone with a few years of programming experience could write some encryption scheme that *most* people couldn't break. But give your cipher-text to a cryptologist who works for the CIA and it would probably be broken very quickly. It's "secure enough" for what you need but nothing that couldn't easily be broken by someone with training, the means and the determination to break the encryption.

"True randomness" is difficult to achieve. Some of the serious generators have special hardware that generates random sequences from "white noise" that's present in the airwaves. I one worked for a security company and we needed a good random generator. You can't simply use some mathematical scheme that multiplies some numbers and returns the modulo result multiplied by something. The reason is that this formula, even if it pbuttes the Knuth test for spectral purity, is repeatable and since it's repeatable isn't random.

The scheme we used created several threads with forced contention between the threads. Each thread had access to a shared "long int" and would set-clear some bits of that variable. The end result is that these threads "randomly" run, collide with each other, and set-clear the bits of this shared variable. You end up with a "random value" that isn't deterministic and is not repeatable.