David J. Aronson wrote: >Now, suppose you salt the plaintext with rarer characters, so as to >flatten out the distribution. > > I believe compression has the same effect, actually--compression uses fewer bits for common characters, and the result is that the distribution of bytes is flatter, and harder to attack. -- /=====================================================\ |John Stracke |jstracke@centivinc.com | |Principal Engineer|http://www.centivinc.com | |Centiv |My opinions are my own. | |=====================================================| |"No, no, that's *not* a boat, that's Queen Victoria."| \=====================================================/