> Of course, this won’t be anywhere near as efficient as just implementing the decoder in C
> It is quite easy to add new built-in modules to Python, if you know how to program in C. Such extension modules can do two things that can’t be done directly in Python: they can implement new built-in object types, and they can call C library functions and system calls.
Then why are you talking about this instead of extension modules?
> quiet preloading of an attacker-selected state while the machine is off.
That attacker with physical access can chose from multiple other attacks, so why bother making this one more secure. They can sniff keyboard strokes, install malware into the UEFI, etc. pp.
> To give you an example, fsck.ext4 will happily carve a working filesystem out of random data
What application does this have for recovering user data? Would it not be more interesting to see how much of the user data can be recovered? Or are you implying that the random data can symbolize the user data here and much of it would be recovered?
42^3 = 138 mod 493
It should read
42^3 mod 493 = 138