Comments on Bill the Lizard: A Brief History of Cryptography

Bruce Schneier contribution in security network ar...

2010-10-10T17:20:18.410-04:00

Bruce Schneier contribution in security network are great, he really throw light on the topics which currently is being faced by the online community.
[url]http://securiour.com[/url]

Jeff, I've always been impressed with projects lik...

2009-05-04T19:29:00.000-04:00

Jeff,
I've always been impressed with projects like distributed.net and the GIMPS that allow us mere mortals to participate in something we wouldn't be able to contribute much to otherwise. My favorite has to be the SETI@home project. The others get to report at least incremental progress every few months or years. The SETI project is different. It's likely to have exactly zero results for a very long time, but when it does get a result it will probably be the most important thing that ever happens. (I say probably because the Singularity is another possible "very important" event.)

Tim, Thanks for the link to the Schneier article. ...

2009-05-04T08:41:00.000-04:00

Tim,
Thanks for the link to the Schneier article. It's good to see that debate laid to rest by a reputable expert. Everything I'd read up until recently used fairly weak language to allege that the NSA weakened DES. Even the Wikipedia DES article I linked to only goes as far as saying that the NSA didn't have that much influence over the algorithm and key size, and that all changes were made by IBM. I've never read anywhere else that the changes made DES stronger.

Schneier on the history of DES: http://www.schneie...

2009-05-04T07:22:00.000-04:00

Schneier on the history of DES:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html

At the end he mentions that the NSA changes to the cipher actually strengthened it.

Good overview. One interesting thing about the 90'...

2009-05-03T17:05:00.000-04:00

Good overview. One interesting thing about the 90's was that kids like me could participate in "cracking" with distributed.net. Back when the keysizes were reasonable (e.g. 64 bits and less) and computers didn't have variable speed fans (e.g. they were always noisy), it was really fun to participate on teams to attack DES and RC4. I think distributed.net demonstrated a big shift in thinking of how much latent computing power was out there and was one of the final blows to DES (even before EFF).

Another interesting development recently is the strong cryptanalysis of hash functions, especially MD5 (with examples of PDFs with opposite messages that have the same hash!) and more recently SHA-1. This has led to the current open competition for the next federal hash algorithm standard. (One interesting note is that the recent Conficker worm used an entrant to this competition - MD6, it seems blackhats like to keep up on crypto too).

Fun stuff.

2009-05-03T14:44:00.000-04:00

Fun stuff.

great post! thank you!

2009-05-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

great post! thank you!