Editing Chaffing and winnowing (section)

== Variations ==

The simple variant of the chaffing and winnowing technique described above adds many bits of overhead per bit of original message. To make the transmission more efficient, Alice can process her message with an [[all-or-nothing transform]] and then send it out in much larger chunks. The chaff packets will have to be modified accordingly. Because the original message can be reconstructed only by knowing all of its chunks, Charles needs to send only enough chaff packets to make finding the correct combination of packets computationally infeasible.

Chaffing and winnowing lends itself especially well to use in [[packet-switched network]] environments such as the [[Internet]], where each message (whose payload is typically small) is sent in a separate network packet. In another variant of the technique, Charles carefully interleaves packets coming from multiple senders. That eliminates the need for Charles to generate and inject bogus packets in the communication. However, the text of Alice's message cannot be well protected from other parties who are communicating via Charles at the same time. This variant also helps protect against [[information leakage]] and [[traffic analysis]].{{Citation needed|date=November 2007}}