Slashdot Mirror
Schneier On the US Crypto Competition
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.
But I though that it was only terrorists that use encryption??
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
If your algorithm is showing weaknesses, then throwing more bits at the problem is best reserved as a temporary solution. At the worst this competition will just give us an alternative hash algorithm, and that is probably reason enough to have it.