Talking in code...

[Cadmium]

There are other examples where codes might work:

In Aussie Mafia on the GL, I was a role name investigator. One night, I found out that a player was one of the Beegees. This was unknown to the mafia and the rest of the town (excluding the mason). I posted something like: "Who could you be? Gee!!". Not even the masons themselves got this until we all had to claim and I refered to that post. It proved that I knew his role.

I didn't say

might work

for nothing. In the above example, I could have been a mafia spy too. Others have said it before, it's not just the town who can leave messages. And mafia are looking harder for it too. And that's exactly the reason why the town might not believe you either.

[Malaprop]

Matcam -- one time pads, if not reused, have been proven to be unbreakable. Nature of the beast.

I can't say I like the idea of a game thread just being full of near-random strings of encrypted text. Dropping hints (as Cadmium just mentioned) is a good idea, little text hiding is OK, but breaking out the real crypto is no fun.

[Norinel]

I've already mentioned one-time pads, but the only secure way to distribute the pads would be at night (In which case it's only good for masons, and after they're outed, as I said), or before the game, which would almost certainly be frowned upon.

[mathcam]

Matcam -- one time pads, if not reused, have been proven to be unbreakable. Nature of the beast.

Okay, fair enough, but this isn't really a cryptographic protocol. It, in turn, has its own drawbacks, as Norinel points out.

Cam

[MMCL]

How about the box with two locks approach...

I have a message I want to send to mathcam (for example) so I use my procedure to encode it... I then display it in my post... mathcam then takes the encoded text and encodes it using his own procedure. He then displays the result. I then decode his result and post the message a 2nd time...
All mathcam needs to do now is decode the message one last time and he has the original text...

[mithy]

Not sure if this has been mentioned or not...

Back in one of the GL games (one of the newbie games, actually, now I think of it), I was a mason, and was of course quite vocal and such. We were getting close to an endgame, and all of the masons were still alive. I figured I would soon die, having been confirmed by a cop, so I came up with a very very random code scheme. Basically I coded the mason's names into bits of message, and posted them, sending the method of finding their names in them that night by email. That way, if I died, and one of them was close to being lynched, they could clear themselves without the others having to come out.

The Mafia could fake something, but then the masons would just come out and get him lynched, so it was pretty foolproof.

Of course, the Mafia never killed me, and we won easily.

[Yoko Kurama]

Yoko, what if in ex 1 you had been killed? What if you had been followed by a Lassie type role? Then THAT person would be certain you were scum until you revealed the code, now you have exposed another investigator. There are just too many cases where that is bad.

-JEEP

Ex1 was a newbie game in which I was a claimed cop and the doc was alive my chances were very very good at not dying.

[mathcam]

How about the box with two locks approach...

I have a message I want to send to mathcam (for example) so I use my procedure to encode it... I then display it in my post... mathcam then takes the encoded text and encodes it using his own procedure. He then displays the result. I then decode his result and post the message a 2nd time...
All mathcam needs to do now is decode the message one last time and he has the original text...

Depending on how you choose to "encode" in this example, this is called the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, used prominently both with RSA and with Elliptic Curve Cryptography. This is a decent protocol, but it hinges on the difficulty of cracking the encoding. If I can brute force the cracking of your encryption, then it doesn't matter how fancy of a protocol you use.

Cam

[Caesar K]

Lots of big words cam ={

I think we're pretty much assuming that, as long as a decent attempt is made, no one is going to crack the encryption. These aren't top-secret messages on which the fate of the world rests - it's just a game.

Thus MMCL brought this up as a simple solution for the problem of how to establish communication without a pre-discussed "code word" or "encryption key" or some such thing.

However, this "two locks" procedure depends on the encryption being commutative, does it not? I know very little about cryptography and so forth, but I imagine there exist some non-commutative encryptions, and so these would have to be avoided.

CK

[mathcam]

It does indeed necessitate commutativity, at least at first glance. There are non-commutative encryptions, but as you point out, these would need fancier protocols.

Cam

[Cadmium]

It does indeed necessitate commutativity, at least at first glance. There are non-commutative encryptions, but as you point out, these would need fancier protocols.

I don't think I've ever seen this code before, math. What is it ?

[mathcam]

Hmm. I'm not sure if I'm being mocked or not.

Cam

[Cadmium]

This would be the part where you say that my English sucks .

[PolarBoy]

Your

english

sucks too.

[Cadmium]

PolarBoy, leave my girlfriend out of this, will ya !

But, yeah, that's what you get when you're not from

england

.

[mathcam]

Oh, now I get it. Some times...

Cam

[MMCL]

lol

[Cadmium]

Oh, now I get it. Some times...

Just smack me when it gets out of control .

[halo freak]

very interesting guise in london and not to everyones surpirse it worked out alright flying dutchman. i thought it was very clever.

[headstone]

I know this would ruin the game, but townies could talk to eachother in code by using the

n

th word in the townie email as a key.

[Dragon Phoenix]

I will mod kill any player who tries that in a game I'm modding. I leave any game in which it is tolerated. I absolutely hate that type of tactics.

[mathcam]

It's fairly clearly (though admittedly indirectly) modquoting, which is prohibited (and, as DP points out, punishable by modkill) in almost all games on the site.

Cam

[Cadmium]

Not to mention cracked within a couple of minutes .