I know theres AES and PGP, but all electronics stuff still has backdoors. You can’t backdoor a piece of paper and a writing utensil.
I know theres AES and PGP, but all electronics stuff still has backdoors. You can’t backdoor a piece of paper and a writing utensil.
This is how all modern cryptography works. A deterministic cipher is functionally no different from pig Latin when it comes to actual security. An electronic solution like public key cryptography is infinitely more secure. If you’re especially paranoid you can generate the cryptotext locally and send it by email; that would be much safer than anything you could achieve by hand.
I would think mailing a flash drive with the key and sending the message electronically would be safer. One requires knowledge of the other.
That’s assuming the key and message are entirely independent. If you or the recipient isthe type of person or doing the types of things that would attract surveillance from a nation state (because realistically that’s the one of the only scenarios where non-esoteric privacy practices might not cut it), it’s not unrealistic that they’d intercept both your digital and physical mail and would be able to correlate them. At least with public key encryption, the private key is never actually in transit.
And that’s why if you’re in that position, you should have already shared your public key with them long in advance and your private key stays encrypted on an air-gapped laptop running Tails + CoreBoot. The message stays encrypted and you’re the only one with the physical device and knowledge to decipher it.
But that all comes down to security vs convenience. I’m super glad passkeys are starting to become available in a lot more places. They’re super convenient and if you use a password manager responsibly with a hardware key, they’re just as secure as the locks on your house.
Which is to say, not very, because ultimately nothing beats a $5 wrench.