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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."
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?
Poland got there first, but when the Germans invaded completely ran out of resources and handed all their research over to England. A lot of work further down the line, and we (I'm English) were breaking the 3 wheel standard Enigma within hours of getting the first encrypted transmissions, thanks to Turing's 'bombes' (electro mechanical decrypting devices).
However, when it came to the German naval Enigma, the 4 wheel version, we ground to a halt. We didn't have the resources to build enough hardware to break the crypts within any time that the info would have helped. So we called in the US to help build more gear.. It was a big team effort.
Note however, that the 3rd Reich trusted Enigma utterly. They fell into the trap of thinking they were completely secure, and that was the downfall of Enigma, as it would be of any trusted encryption. Encryption by definition is breakable in a certain length of time. The problem with Enigma was that there were backdoors, such as the fact it never encrypted any letter as itself. 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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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....
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> 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 ?
It's a US government standard, meaning that all government-related (whatever that means) should use it (or something like that). It's just another algorithm instead of DES/3DES to be used as The Official US Government Encryption Standard.
Some pieces-o'-software, both free and commercial, use Rijndael, but it's not a standard (ISO or ANSI or whatever).
> Will I have to pay royalties if I intend to write AES-compliant programs then sell related services ?
Probably not. There are plenty of free implementations of the Rijndael algorithm, and from what I can figure out, there doesn't seem do be any restrictions to it. From the authour's page:
Rijndael is available for free. You can use it for whatever purposes you want, irrespective of whether it is accepted as AES or not.
Even if the US government puts some kind of export restriction on software using it, it's still very available (in several free (of some kind) implementations) outside US.
NIST too, provide their own reference implementation.
> 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 ?
The algorithm was invented by "the public" (two guys in Belgium), not by NIST or the US government. NIST just selected the one algorithm they considered the most appropriate from the whole lot of available encryption algorithms out there.
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
I found several notes on the openssl users list which seem to indicate that AES/Rijndael support will be available in OpenSSL 0.9.7. This has not been released yet, but is reportedly available in the CVS area.
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.
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In addition, AES may have problems we don't even know yet. DES turned out not to require brute forcing.
RFC2440, which defines the OpenPGP standard, already reserves 3 AES keys sizes (128, 192, 256-bit).
Gnupg already supports AES in all 3 block sizes and so does 'official' PGP v7.0x.
PGP since v7.x hasn't been open source, so you won't find any details at www.pgpi.org. The best way to add AES support to previous 'open source' versions is to use the CKT builds by Imad. These are still based upon the v6.58 code base but contains dozens of fixes and improvements.
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
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.
>The S-tables were thought to have been chosen to
>make the algorithm easy to break for someone who
>knew the secret.
Yes, this is what was _thought_.
When differential cryptanalysis was discovered in 1991, many DES 'replacements' were completely broken, but DES itself was only weakened, not broken.
It turned out to be those NSA-picked S-boxes that made it much more secure than the alternatives. So, they actualy made the algorithm stronger, not weaker.
(and they had appearently knew about differential cryptanalysis some 20 years before the academic world did. scary, isn't it?)
--
GCP
BouncyCastle.
It amazes me how often open source authors pick self-destructive names. A serious effort should not be limited by a humorous or trick name.
A name like BouncyCastle will limit the number of people who adopt the software. People are afraid there is a hidden joke they don't understand.
There are times when it is appropriate to be 100 percent serious.
I am NOT saying anything negative about the software. The ONLY negative thing I am saying about the authors is that they are obviously not professional communicators.
Open Source Software needs marketing communication like any product that wants to reach a large number of people.
Bush's education improvements were
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
In other news, Attorney General John Ashcroft "detained" all 857 employees of the NIST as "suspected terrorists". They are being held incommunicado at an undisclosed location, awaiting execution by a miliary tribunal. "We can't just have people releasing encryption algorithms whenever they feel like it, even if they are employees of the US Government," said Ashcroft. When it was pointed out to him that bin Laden avoids technical means of communication in favor of face-to-ear whispers among trusted family members, Ashcroft replied: "That's OK. Better to execute 857 innocent geeks than allow one terrorist to slip through."
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I think you're confused. RSA claimed, in their Scientific American article at least, that their 100-bit key would take millions of years to break. In fact, advances in factoring algorithms (and to a far less extent, raw computing power) lead to it being broken in less than 20 years. Now the minimal recommended key size is 400 bits longer, amd most of us use keys 900 bits longer.
DES was never expected to have a lifetime longer than 25 years or so. The cryptanalysts who designed DES never heard of Moore's law, and wouldn't have cared about it if they had. They knew that the most important factor was algorithm efficiency, not the raw computing power.
In fact, a study in Programming Pearls a while back compared the effects of improved algorithms vs. improved hardware speed for several historically hard problems. The results were clear - hardware is getting faster, but you could still run circles around the latest supercomputer running 1960s era algorithms with your PDA running current algorithms. (Okay, the original article compared Crays to TRS-80s, but kids today may not know what a trash-80 is.)
The only reason computers seem slower is that they're used to solve far bigger problems. People tend to be willing to spend the same amount of time solving problems, and for a given time O(nlg(n)) has a far larger value of 'n' than O(n^3).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
- The new standard contains a sophisticated mathematical formula known as an algorithm.
Did anyone else find this to be hilarious? I can see a manager saying something like, "We need to write this at a 6th-grade level of comprehension. Be sure to define the word 'algorithm'."Check out Chad's News