Now From Bruce Schneier, the Skein Hash Function

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier and company have created a new hash function called Skein. From his blog entry: 'NIST is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions, which have been increasingly under attack. (I wrote about an early NIST hash workshop here.) Skein is our submission (myself and seven others: Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas, and Jesse Walker). Here's the paper."

Comments

Good to see Bruce back

[CRCulver]

I had long feared that the skilled cryptographer Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography , had been utterly replaced by Bruce Schneier the security consultant who peddles his wares in all of his recent lightweight publications. It's nice to see the cryptographer return.

Time to get glasses

[smooth wombat]

Read the title as "Skin Hash Function". For a moment, wasn't sure if this was a SFW article.

Re:Time to get glasses

[gardyloo]

Of course! Or it gets the hose again.

A likely story

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we know he's not just spinning a good yarn here?

Re:What the hell is Threefish

[andrewd18]

Personally, I'm waiting for the cypher built on Onefish, Twofish, Redfish, and Bluefish.

Re:Hax

[The Clockwork Troll]

Did you know your uid is a prime number when interpreted in base 7 or 11?

How do you sleep at night?

Re:What the hell is Threefish

[Mister Whirly]

or what about Redfish and Bluefish?

Quick trick function stack

[TiggertheMad]

Personally, I'm waiting for the cypher built on Onefish, Twofish, Redfish, and Bluefish.

I do not like it encrypting my stocks,
I do not like it securing my box,
I do not like it, sam-I-am.

Bruce Schneier Facts

[brunes69]

There are no finite state machines. There are only a series of states that Bruce Schneier allows to exist.

Bruce Schneier can tell you where to find your GPG key into the digits of PI.

Bruce Schneier owns a chicken that lays scrambled eggs. Whenever he wants a hard-boiled egg, he just unscrambles one.

SHA = "Schneier has access" SHA2 = "Schneier has access - and a spare too"

When transmitted over any socket, Bruce Schneier's public key causes libpcap to enter an infinite malloc loop.

Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret.

Bruce Schneier's secure handshake is so strong, you won't be able to exchange keys with anyone else for days.

Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat

When Bruce Schneier observes a quantum particle, it remains in the same state until he has finished observing it.

Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of AlphaBits.

http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/

Re:Sounds good, but MD5 et al. still have a place

[Lord Ender]

Given a specific dataset with a specific MD5 hash, you can create another dataset with the same hash in minimal time (a few minutes on a modern computer).

That isn't even remotely true. MD5 has been demonstrated to be easier to break than advertised, therefore it is wise to use better hashes. But when I say "better than advertised" I'm saying defeating a good hash is about as easy as any of us getting Angelina Jolie in the sack; but someone has discovered a trick that makes defeating MD5 about as easy as bagging Paris Hilton. For all practical purposes, none of us will achieve either, but Paris is still no Angelina Jolie...