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Schneier On the US Crypto Competition

Posted by kdawson on from the ante-up dept.

Bruce Schneier has a commentary in Wired titled An American Idol for Crypto Geeks on the US government's competition for a new cryptographic hash function to become the national standard, covered here recently. He talks about how much the competition, slated to wrap up by 2011, will advance the cryptographic state of the art. And how much fun he expects to have.

1 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whirlpool by MostAwesomeDude · · Score: 3, Informative

    The patents (or lack thereof) have not had effects on cryptography endorsements before. One of the more popular AES candidates in use is the 384-bit key-based cipher, Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions. One common use is for LUKS or Truecrypt hard drive encryption, and another is in BSD password hashes (the idea being that it takes the cipher about two seconds to reset itself internally each time a password is guessed, and so even with the ciphertext, the password takes a longer time to crack.)

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    ~ C.