Editing CipherSaber (section)

{{Short description|Encryption protocol}}
{{Refimprove|date=November 2009}}
'''CipherSaber''' is a simple [[symmetric encryption]] [[Protocol (computing)|protocol]] based on the [[RC4]] stream cipher.  Its goals are both technical and [[politics|political]]: it gives reasonably strong protection of message confidentiality, yet it's designed to be simple enough that even novice [[programmer]]s can memorize the algorithm and implement it from scratch.  According to the designer, a CipherSaber version in the [[QBASIC programming language]]  takes just sixteen lines of code.  Its political aspect is that because it's so simple, it can be reimplemented anywhere at any time, and so it provides a way for users to communicate privately even if [[government]] or other controls make distribution of normal cryptographic software completely impossible.