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.

Re:Terrorists??

[darkhitman]

Encryption is not the same as hashing.

Damn terrorists!

Re:Whirlpool

[MostAwesomeDude]

The patents (or lack thereof) have not had effects on cryptography endorsements before. One of the more popular AES candidates in use is the 384-bit key-based cipher, Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions. One common use is for LUKS or Truecrypt hard drive encryption, and another is in BSD password hashes (the idea being that it takes the cipher about two seconds to reset itself internally each time a password is guessed, and so even with the ciphertext, the password takes a longer time to crack.)

Re:Whirlpool

[Ckwop]

The patents (or lack thereof) have not had effects on cryptography endorsements before.

Yes they have. In particular the AES competition required that submitters adhere to certain restrictions [aes.org] regarding patents.

One of the more popular AES candidates in use is the 384-bit key-based cipher, Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions.

Blowfish was never an AES candiate [quadibloc.com]

.. Blowfish, which has a public domain specification and is very useful in slow key-rescheduling conditions.

I'm not even sure what you mean here. On the whole, a slow key-schedule is a bad idea. You want your key schedule to be as fast as possible. The reason for this is that a fast key-schedule means you can target more platforms with the cipher (such as smart cards et al).

If you want to slow down dictionary attacks there are better ways to do this. Repeatedly hashing the passphrase is more sensible since the number of hashes can be scaled to the platform speed. Stopping a brute-force of a smart card is a world different to brute-force of a PGP disk.

Blowfish on the whole is a poor design. Now that we have AES I would recommend that over anything else.

Simon