So it adds no significant difficulty when the plaintext is in a foreign language with few translators you have access to? It was pointless for the US military to use Navajo code-talkers? The shortage of Arabic translators imposes no notable cost on the CIA’s eavesdroppers?
Those things are difficult, sure, and I never said otherwise. But I’m not sure you appreciate just how staggeringly hard it is to break modern crypto. Navajo code-talkers are using a human language, with patterns that can be figured out by a properly determined adversary. There are quite a lot of people who can translate Arabic. Those are nowhere near the difficulty of, say, eavesdropping on a message encrypted with AES-128 when you don’t know the key. Or finding a collision with a given SHA-256 hash. Those things are hard.
So it adds no significant difficulty when the plaintext is in a foreign language with few translators you have access to? It was pointless for the US military to use Navajo code-talkers? The shortage of Arabic translators imposes no notable cost on the CIA’s eavesdroppers?
Those things are difficult, sure, and I never said otherwise. But I’m not sure you appreciate just how staggeringly hard it is to break modern crypto. Navajo code-talkers are using a human language, with patterns that can be figured out by a properly determined adversary. There are quite a lot of people who can translate Arabic. Those are nowhere near the difficulty of, say, eavesdropping on a message encrypted with AES-128 when you don’t know the key. Or finding a collision with a given SHA-256 hash. Those things are hard.