Modern History of Cryptography Techniques

Heather writes "The encryption scheme you rely on today might be full of holes just a few years down the road. Learn how far we've come in the last few decades, and why your apps need to be ready for change. This article builds on a previous article about Enigma, Germany's WWII-era encryption system."

Comments

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can I never undestand articles about cryptography?

They always seem to be written in a way that makes them incomprehensible.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, let me be clear.
Alice ("A") writes a story about Cryptography ("C") to the IBM Developerworks site ("D"). Bob ("B") is watching over her shoulder, essentially intercepting the photons ("-->P")
Bob, then submits the story to the Slashdot ("S")
Anonymous Coward Reader ("R") is confused because they are written in a way (encrypted "+*+") to make them incomprehensible.

So essentially, you are saying you don't understand:
R ?= A(D)--->P(B)+*+"--->S
What could be simpler than that???

Re:Why a few years down the road?

[rholliday]

I suppose technically that's correct. But, "The encryption schem you use today has holes in it, and the tools will get small enough to go through those holes just a few years down the road." just doesn't quite roll off the tongue. :)

Mod parent up

[utopianfiat]

That is really awesome.
Now I just need the US Army Guide To Understanding The US Army Guide To Code Breaking

Re:I just encrypt disks full of white noise nowada

[utopianfiat]

I think it'd be fun to try to compress white noise files, and see how well it compresses.

WHITE NOISE DRINKING GAME:
Ingredients:
BSD-based systems with random number generators, need to be the same or it's just unfair.
Your favorite method of compression.
Alcohol

Steps:
1) each of you dd if=/dev/urandom of=./noise.txt for however big you want the file to be. Bigger is better, imho.
2) bzip2 noise.txt or your favorite compression algorithm
3) whoever's file size is the highest has to drink.

You can mix it up and write a shell script that does the following:
TIME=`date +%s`
bzip2 $1
TIME=`date +%s`-$TIME
echo $TIME sec. elapsed

HA!

[MosesJones]

I just used MD5 as my encryption mechanism and the files will NEVER be recovered.

This "joke" such as it is was based on a real world experience where the "smart" IT chap at a company I helped had in his words...

"Tried a number of different compression and encryption approaches and MD5 consistently gave the smallest files"

I asked if they had ever done a recovery, and strangely they had not... it was fun watching them try.

Re:HA!

[utopianfiat]

"Oh my god, MD5 ate the files!"
"WHAT?"
"It just finished digesting!"

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

And if it gets cracked...

[Overzeetop]

you can just send the justice department after them for a DMCA violation. Worked for Adobe :-)