When sending a packet, would you first encrypt or compress it?

Question

Mike · Accepted Answer

Compress then encrypt.

Compression looks for patterns in random bytes of datastreams and then attempts to reduce these patterns to aid in compression. Encryption attempts to increase randomness/entropy, so you can see the obvious issue in doing it the other way

Anonymous · Answer

Compress it since that with a smaller size it gets more difficult for an attacker to intercept it, if you encrypt it, it actually doesn't matter if the attacker is able to sniff it.

Anonymous · Answer

compression goal is always to reduce the redundancy in meta data but if you first do an encryption then there are only few times you get the cipher text with lot of redundancy so compression has no or very minimal effect on encrypted files. Hence first do compression then encryption.

Anonymous · Answer

compression goal is always to reduce the redundancy in meta data but if you first do an encryption then there are only few times you get the cipher text with lot of redundancy so compression has no or very minimal effect on encrypted files. Hence first do compression then encryption.

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