Logic in list messages WAS: Re: Odd log messages from ISC BIND named

[VirginSnow at vfemail.net]

> Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2009 11:15:26 -0500
> From: Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com>
> Cc: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org

> The entire purpose for the attack potentials you meantioned would
> have NOTHING to do with attacking liberty.

Correct.

>   To break it down, the sort of attack you are infering would be
> utilized when an entity was able to observe some form of encrypted
> traffic, where it has knowledge of the data which WAS encrypted.  In
> this scenerio, an attacker would, say, transmit said known packets
> over an ethernet network, and then observe the encrypted packets,
> and record.

Yes.  That's basically what's called a "known plaintext" attack.

> Who the packets are destined to isn't of any importance.

As I tried to show by listing header fields, the destination IP
address *is* important because it appears toward the begining of the
packet.  Depending on the cipher mode used to encrypt the packet, this
could ===>> change the rest of the ciphertext even if the rest of the
plaintext was identical <<===.  That's why it's most useful to twiddle
bits at the end of the packet: most messages, whatever cipher mode is
used to encrypt them, are encrypted from front to back.