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AES Announced as Federal Standard
chekhov writes: "Today NIST has finally announced AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) as a Federal Standard after 4 years of development. See the press release. AES is the replacement of DES and is expected to be used in financial systems and secure networks for up to 20 years. More information on the AES homepage."
There a big ambiguity that I couldn't really sort out while reading these web pages: Is this an Open standard or a Commercial standard ?
Will I have to pay royalties if I intend to write AES-compliant programs then sell related services?
I actually read in the facts page that the "public" helped building the algorithm and specs but in which way is that AES thing public?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Interesting that the US government was busy asking people to try to crack an encryption standard, while at the same time upholding a law to make breaking encryption illegal.
So, now that this encryption method is officially accepted, will it be illegal to try to crack it?
One of the perks of cryptography seems to be the chance to make up words for big numbers! 1 undecillion = 10^36
10^3 = Thousand
10^6 = Million
10^9 = Billion
10^12 = Trillion
10^15 = Zillion(?)
...
I seem to remeber Douglas Adams invented a 'grillion' but don't know how big that was supposed to be
personally I am a fan of serpant Ross Anderson work because I understand it and after some conversations with people who know both I think its better than AES
the sooner AES is used widely the better though
regards
john 'keys ? no sir I forget things' jones
Your better bet is to work out how to solve NP hard problems (or any one) and map it back to the crypto algorithm. But of course you'll be able to do that easily once IBM releases it's first quantum computer....
.sig
The security of AES is currently being hailed as the fact it has a key field 10 to the 21 times larger than 56bit DES. Great. Only an idiot would try to brute force it though, so the number of keys is somewhat arbitrary.
Key length is, of course, vitally important. Understand the Rijndael spec. before you continue your speculation. Also, many "idiots" try to brute force it. Effort required to force a key is proportional to the cipher's weakness.
Less generally, by employing lack of symmetry and a non-linear layer in the cipher, AES pretty much gurantees that you'll simply be searching the key-space at random. If you can come up with a way to do better than a brute force, you should quit your current job.
The 2^255 Rijandel iterations required to force a 32 byte key is certainly sufficiently secure by todays standards, but historically consistent increases in computing power coupled with increased distributed processing ability due to networked computer proliferation means that keys will have to keep growing to stay resonably secure.
sig is
Now, if I happen to successfully develop an AES "decryptor", may I publish its source code without infringing the DMCA [tompox.com] ?
The inventors of Rijndael, who seem to be exceptionally intelligent and sane people, would probably be more than happy to be challenged with a real attack on the algorithm. Unless you have a PHD in Mathematics specializing cryptoanalysis you probably needn't waste your breath though.
Of course, if the media industry has had time to implement AES in one of their ridiculous UHT (User Hostile Tech) schemes, you may well end up under legal attack, as could, very possibly, the authors of the algorithm themselves should they find a flaw. It has been noted that the media industries will probably not go after "academics" in the short term considering how the Felten affair blew up on them (Russian's apparently don't count).
Just because the enemy has usurped the term "secure" for their UHT does not mean that you should confuse all encryption with DMCA etc. These algorithms really are secure, based on real math that most people agree not even the NSA can break, and do not rely on stupid "gun in mouth" schemes to keep people from breaking them as UHT invariably does.
You still use crypto software you have to pay for? [Yes, this was a joke, maybe you only use crypto "for personal use".]
GnuPG, on the other hand, developed AES capability less than 2 days after NIST originally approved Rijndael last year. The next public release wasn't for a week or two, but still.... (Well, NIST officially "approved" it just now, but they "recommended it for approval" just over a year ago.) I remember seeing a message from the GnuPG development list about an hour after the NIST announcement saying "I'm working on it."
GnuPG is similar to the command-line version of PGP and supports the same file formats / protocols, but is free for all uses and isn't affiliated with Phil Zimmerman or Computer Associates. I don't know if it has the same depth of plugin support for third-party apps, but hey, it's supported by all the Linux apps I need it for.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
In 1976 Donald Knuth published a paper titled Coping with Finiteness in which he names a number Super K. It is defined as 10^^^^3 where 10^^10 = 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 or 10^10 10 times.
I couldn't find the paper (damnit) but Knuth says in Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
"If you don't agree that Super K is so large as to be beyond human comprehension, I can at least prove conclusively that if you consider all the numbers less than or equal to Super K, almost all of them are impossible to describe in any way in the univerise"
I dunno, is that bigger than a googleplex? I wouldn't be surprised if the Guinness people spent less than 30 seconds researching this - in fact I suspect this was just some piece of useless trivia someone who happened to be in the office that day happened to know
Cryptonomicon is a good book, as is Enigma by Robert Harris.. however, they are works of fiction.
The Germans changed the wheel order, start positions, and reflector positions on the Enigma machines nightly, but that wasn't enough. The operators often used the same start codes over and over again, they sent predictable messages, and, like I said, there were issues with the Enigma itself. The UK RAF set up 'traps' by mining specific locations of the English Channel, and then Bletchly Park knew that the messages from specific lookout posts would contain the coordinates of the mines.. a very useful crib.
Try books such as Station X, Engima, Seizing The Enigma, and The Code Book for a readable history..
(The Code Book even has a nice challenge at the end (although the prize has been claimed))
http://twitter.com/onion2k
US Government classified information? What the heck are they using for classified info crypto? From the article:
Q: What is the chance that someone could use the "DES Cracker"-like hardware to crack an AES key?
In the late 1990s, specialized "DES Cracker" machines were built that could recover a DES key after a few hours. In other words, by trying possible key values, the hardware could determine which key was used to encrypt a message.
A: Assuming that one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second (i.e., try 255 keys per second), then it would take that machine approximately 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a 128-bit AES key. To put that into perspective, the universe is believed to be less than 20 billion years old.
snip...
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) will be a new Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication that will specify a cryptographic algorithm for use by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive (unclassified) information.