Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why can I never undestand articles about cryptography?
They always seem to be written in a way that makes them incomprehensible.
The encryption scheme you rely on today might be full of holes just a few years down the road.
If is will be full of holes just a few years down the road, wouldn't it then be correct to say it's full of holes now?!
U.S. Army Guide to Code Breaking.
That is really awesome.
Now I just need the US Army Guide To Understanding The US Army Guide To Code Breaking
+5, Truth
DES was *not* considered "uncrackable" when it was launched. In fact, cryptographers such as Michael Weiner warned that the key was too short and described the dangers of a hardware-based key cracker practically as soon as it was announced.
The history of cryptography is not simply one of algorithms thought uncrackable being cracked. It is one of consistent refinement of our understanding and technique, but to imagine that the history of DES means we'll be breaking open 256-bit AES-encrypted messages in a few years is delusion.
Xenu loves you!
The article has no discussion of truly modern encryption schemes (their description stops at RSA/PGP and they don't even go into any details); it has no discussion of why modern schemes are considered more secure than DES, no discussion of what might make them less secure (i.e., no mention of factoring/discrete logs as the root 'hard problems' behind current crypto) and no discussion of what's on the horizon in terms of things like quantum cryptography.
On the other hand, it does go into cheerful detail on why IBM's Exciting New Coprocessor (r) is the right solution for your enterprise encryption needs!
I know IBM are the 'Good Guys' and all, but that doesn't make advertising for them (especially in the form of a front-page slashdot article) any more palatable than advertising for anyone else...
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
+5, Truth
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi