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CryptoDox: Encyclopedia on Cryptography & Info

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Sep 17, 2006 10:41 AM
from the soemthing-to-learn-about dept.
Security Encryption
xorgb writes "CryptoDox is an online encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security. The data is being made available under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is powered by MediaWiki and in the few months that it has been online it has got some good articles on the basics of cryptography. It is currently looking out for contributors to enhance its database of articles. Check it out!"
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[+] 30 Years of Public Key Cryptography 83 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Public key crypto turned 30 last night, and the biggest names in crypto turned out to celebrate at an event hosted at the Computer History Museum. Voltage Security teamed with RSA to bring together some of the most famous cryptographers of yesterday (Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman) and today (Dan Boneh), along with luminaries Ray Ozzie, Brian Snow, and Jim Bidzos. From the ZDNet article: 'NYT reporter John Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley for 30 years, was master of ceremonies, and started off by saying that no technology has had a more profound impact than cryptography, and that public-key cryptography has been underappreciated for its role in the Internet. Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.' You can view the podcast and pictures of the event at the Voltage Security site.."
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CryptoDox: Encyclopedia on Cryptography & Info 47 Comments More /

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  • You'll need the PGP public key on page five to read the contents
    • I didn't see a page on cracking the PGP public key. Either this site is not comprehensive, it's encrypted or the government re-re-classified it. What's the FBI doing at my door now?! I'm outta of here!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by WilliamSChips (793741)
      In addition, his tears can break one-time pads. Except that he's never cried...
    • May have been published in '95, but it's still actively updated on his website, still in print, and still as part of university curricula.

  • Inferior (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Summary:

      - too many not found errors
      - slow db query
      - indentical wikipedia article superior
      - only enough information to whet appetite for advertised books
      - lame (as in crippled)

  • Planning to submit? (Score:5, Informative)

    by GC (19160) <giles@coochey.net> on Sunday September 17 2006, @11:09AM (#16124931)
    If you're planning to submit to crytpography documentation I would recommend you contribute to the already extensive Crytpography Project on Wikipedia: Cryptography WikiProject [wikipedia.org]

    The project in the article is rather limited, conflicts with other worthy projects, and made me feel that I was browsing the amazon cryptography book section, what with all the amazon adverts on it.

    • Compatible licensing means room for both (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 (468275) <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Sunday September 17 2006, @11:33AM (#16125017) Homepage Journal
      You make a good point, but in this case I don't think that the other project really detracts too much from Wikipedia in the long run -- they use the same license on their content, so that they could borrow from each other.

      I would hope that the CryptoDox people would at least start by using what's been written in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians would feel free to borrow back improved content that was worked on at CryptoDox.

      I think this is similar to the greater argument between a totally open, encyclopediac-style information source, and a more specialized source with slightly higher barriers to entry. (Not an 'expert system' per se, but just because it's dedicated to a particular topic, it means that only people interested in that topic will probably join.) I think there's room for both, and by using compatible licenses, both can benefit.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The Citizendium, which was recently announced in the slashdot article "Co-founder forks Wikipedia" may stand some change to be an alternative to Wikipedia. There no anonymous editing will be allowed, thus potentially avoiding some problems. It remains to be seen whether stronger controls will lead to better content.
        Cryptodox, however, is not a viable alternative to Wikipedia.
        • I really don't see the point of having all these wikis, it's kinda stupid in my opinion. Joining the wikipedia cryptography project is much more worthwhile. It is much easier to find information and get data when everything is at one place./I>

          To the second part of your comment, I agree, and never meant to imply otherwise. Information certainly is easier to access when it's all in one place. However, and what I was questioning earlier, is whether that's the best way for it to be created.

          I think that infor

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hpavc (129350)
      Why isn't this just part of Wikipedia
    • I agree with that. wiki is one stop info center. It is really helpful ( so do Slashdot ). I don't know to others but it is to me. So...if there is more information in there, it would be great. :- webopedia.com also provides good information as well...

  • I wonder why they didn't go for the obvious coinage-- the fictional Cryptonomicon was supposed to be a collection of crypto wisdom, much as the Necronomicon was supposedly Lovecraft's book of occult and death.

  • I've always kind of wondered if you could use cryptographic principles to enhance communication with a wider audience. Sort of anti-cryptography. Or is there some sort of entropy sort of thing - that you can decrease the understandability of a message, but you can't increase it.
    • I've always kind of wondered if you could use cryptographic principles to enhance communication with a wider audience. Sort of anti-cryptography. Or is there some sort of entropy sort of thing - that you can decrease the understandability of a message, but you can't increase it.

      Cryptographic hashes and public key signatures do exactly that. Hashes ensure the integrity of messages, and signatures authenticate them.
      • Glad you could think of a coherent answer to that, because I certainly couldn't. If you were able to answer it, you'll probably also know what the guestion consisted of. Could you please post it here? I think it would be very interesting (or at least funny) for the original poster to comment on that as well.
        • Wasn't much of a question, I suppose. I guess I was thinking along some shaky logic - If cryptography is a tool designed to obfuscate a message, is it possible to create a tool that can make a message more readily understandable.... I suppose my fallacy is that cryptography is a tool to validate the origin of a message, and not necessarily a tool to "scramble" meaning. The answer, which actually got to the point when I didn't, is that my logic was flawed. Cryptography is a tool of validation, so can be u
          • Long answer: Sort-of.

            Even longer answer: There is a mathematical problem, called "The Byzantine General's Problem", which asks a similarish question: "If there are N people in a group, and M of them corrupt any communication that takes place, what is the smallest ratio of honest people to corrupt people that would allow accurate communication to take place?" This is very closely related to crytography and secure comunications. A variant of this problem is used to describe how you would divide a key into fra

  • Security implies access (Score:3, Funny)

    by Watson Ladd (955755) on Sunday September 17 2006, @11:54AM (#16125084)
    Guess it isn't secure, as proven by its inability to withstand access by slashdoters.

  • Forbidden
    You don't have permission to access / on this server.

    This is the result of visiting http://www.cryptodox.com/ [cryptodox.com] which is the link given in the article. Either none of you who are commenting have bothered to check that site (big surprise huh), or the site has just recently decided to pull its index page, perhaps as a result of being slashdotted.

    Either way, I find it hard to believe that no one else has noticed this.

  • You can hear the cries of frustration now coming from washington ( and a few other governments in the world )

  • Why Is This Article On Slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)

    by tqbf (59350) on Sunday September 17 2006, @01:38PM (#16125497) Homepage

    Last week we had advisories from the OpenSSL project and the Mozilla team that the two most popular open-source implementations of RSA, probably accounting for the majority of all deployed RSA code, were so badly broken that an arbitrary attacker could generate a valid SSL certificate for Wells Fargo offline and sell it.

    This got no coverage on Slashdot. Ok, fine. Maybe it's a bit esoteric.

    Today, an amateur wiki site on cryptography, with (apparently) fewer articles than even the Wikipedia crypto collection, does get coverage.

    What am I missing here?

    • What must be even more annoying is when someone submits a given article, it is rejected, and then at a later time another person submits the exact same article and it is accepted and put on Slashdot's main page.

      I think these are just signs that Slashdot has grown to where the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.

      Now sit back and watch while both of us are modded "Offtopic" into oblivion, even though there is no other place to discuss these things.
    • I agree, neither Wikipedia's crypto stuff or CryptoDox are particularly newsworthy at this point. Or ever.

      I'd just like to point out that when you said, "with (apparently) fewer articles than even the Wikipedia crypto collection", that pretty much every comparable work has fewer articles than the Wikipedia crypto collection; Wikipedia has over a thousand articles on the subject. Now, I'll grant you that the majority are pretty poor, but that's twice as much any other crypto encyclopedia (not that there's a

  • WikiProject Cryptography (Score:4, Informative)

    by clap_hands (320732) on Monday September 18 2006, @02:52AM (#16128454) Homepage
    Disclaimer: I started the English Wikipedia's Cryptography Project page:

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject _Cryptography [wikipedia.org]

    CryptoDox seems to be doing the same thing: creating an encyclopedia about cryptography using MediaWiki. To be honest, I don't really understand why this guy wants to do it outside of Wikipedia -- I've asked him, but he's never given any reason for it . Still, he's quite welcome to do what he likes, of course, and since he's now using the GFDL (he was using Creative Commons Non-Commercial last week), we can copy material back and forth between Wikipedia and CryptoDox. So, if you're into crypto and fancy helping out, feel free get involved with either project -- it's a win for both.
    • That's probably why he's doing it... if you were interested in books by an author, would [normal people, not necessarily you] go to wikipedia to read about them, or would you look for a website about the author/a certain book they've published?

      It's the same case here - if you're looking for info on cryptography, and weren't already knowledgeable that wikipedia had a good crypto project going, you'd probably look for a website that was specifically about disseminating info about cryptography. It's importa
      • "you'd probably look for a website that was specifically about disseminating info about cryptography."

        Sure, but most people would start with a Google search:

        http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cryptograph y [google.co.uk]

        First result is a Wikipedia article.

        I'm all for getting information out to the greatest amount of people, I just don't think that rebuilding a section of Wikipedia in a separate location (and from scratch) is a particularly good way of doing that.

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