Text encryption problem. Thx

[lamnic]

Is there exist any method so that I can transform or encrypt an alpha-numeric characters of length 16 into another string with length less than 10 characters. And by some means I can recover this string back to its original string?
Thx

 

[JohnH]

To make some data less than it was and back again you use compression and decompression methods. I don't think there exist any that is effective on such a small data set as 16 characters. SharpZipLib (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/) and the ones included in .Net 2.0 for instance isn't effective below 256 bytes.

Pure encryption is nothing more than changing one value into another to make it difficult to reveal the true value, so there is nothing to get in that direction either.

 

[groggory]

This is a pretty fun problem. The first thing that comes to mind is the intended alphabet. Is it A-Z, a-z, 0-9 ? Is there punctuation? Is it the entire ASCII? These all make a difference on how to tackle this algorithm.

Get back to me with that and I'll ponder your problem a bit.

Thanks,

Greg

 

[lamnic]

It is purely alpha-numeric characters.

 

[groggory]

This problem is kind of tricky. Is this character set...

A-Z
a-z
0-9

??

I think it'd be much easier with just all lower or all upper. This is kind of hard.