Cryptol, Language of Cryptography, Now Available To the Public

solweil writes to mention that Cryptol, a 'domain specific language for the design, implementation and verification of cryptographic algorithms,' is now available to the public. Cryptol was originally designed for the NSA. It allows for a quick evaluation and continued revisions, and is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Comments

Re:Kudos to NSA

[collinstocks]

Just a correction: Regardless of who developed this (there seems to be some disagreement), nobody turned it over to the public domain. Read the license agreement: it says that you are not allowed to even create derivative works, nor redistribute the program to multiple sources, nor use it for commercial purposes.

Re:Wait... what?

[bhima]

There is no such thing as trusted private encryption. Effective secure encryption is astoundingly complicated and you can not devise effective encryption in a vacuum. Lots of companies show us ineffective untrustworthy encryption which they develop in secret and which fail in short order... like CSS which is used on DVDs or the DRM in popular games and other digital media. Haven't you read folks on Slashdot mocking them for it?

So the best way is do everything out in the open and have people find the weakness in it before it goes into production. Because once it goes into production you don't need to be code breaker to enjoy the stunning stupidity of the fools that rely on private encryption... you only need to be able to find the app with google and download it.

Have a look at look at the ongoing contest for SHA-3. It's been reported here I think. Or you could the about how they came up with AES.

Here's the zoo: http://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo

As a side note: Contests and prizes are remarkably effective method of spending the public's money for public good... as long as the results are open and patent free.

Re:Lack of Functionality

[Dun Malg]

FTFA: "The open version does not compile to VHDL, C/C++, or Haskell, and does not produce the formal models used for equivalence checking."

So does this mean the open version (trial version) which we might have access to does not do much of what it is touted to be good for?

Just another advertisement for a commercial product methinks. Maybe cool, but still a slashvertisement.

- Toast

Yep. Two lines down from the above quote it states:

"Contact Galois to obtain a full-featured version for evaluation."

It's classic crippleware. Free version doesn't do anything useful, and the "full-featured" version costs money and uses a dongle or something.

Re:Kudos to NSA

[Chyeld]

There are infinitely many prime numbers.

The oldest known proof for the statement that there are infinitely many prime numbers is given by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his Elements (Book IX, Proposition 20). Euclid states the result as "there are more than any given [finite] number of primes", and his proof is essentially the following:

Consider any finite set of primes. Multiply all of them together and add 1 (see Euclid number). The resulting number is not divisible by any of the primes in the finite set we considered, because dividing by any of these would give a remainder of 1. Because all non-prime numbers can be decomposed into a product of underlying primes, then either this resultant number is prime itself, or there is a prime number or prime numbers which the resultant number could be decomposed into but are not in the original finite set of primes. Either way, there is at least one more prime that was not in the finite set we started with. This argument applies no matter what finite set we began with. So there are more primes than any given finite number.