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bio website randombit.net
location Vermont
age 31
visits member for 1 year, 10 months
seen Apr 19 at 16:07
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Hobo in training


Jan
22
awarded  Nice Question
Jul
12
awarded  Yearling
Jun
19
comment Are there standards for transport layer security using only symmetric keys?
Probably so, which is why I mentioned CyaSSL which is designed for embedded. There is also MatrixSSL which also supports PSK.
Jun
19
answered Are there standards for transport layer security using only symmetric keys?
Oct
11
awarded  Enlightened
Oct
11
awarded  Nice Answer
Aug
24
answered Can you create a strong blockcipher with small blocksize, given a strong blockcipher of conventional blocksize?
Aug
10
awarded  Enthusiast
Aug
4
comment Tactics available to help prove security of a new system?
+1, and I completely agree with the sentiment here, but want to make an addendum to "The hard bit is to design a cipher that no one else can break." - the really hard part is doing this while having something that is at all competitive from an implementation perspective. It wouldn't be that hard for someone with a decade or so of experience to come up with an algorithm that would be secure if you used, say, 10000 rounds, but which would probably not be secure if you wanted it to be as fast as, say, Rijndael or Twofish. Of course most such people know enough not to bother doing such things...
Aug
4
accepted Are there security issues with discrete logarithm keys not being uniformly distributed?
Aug
4
awarded  Enlightened
Aug
4
awarded  Nice Answer
Aug
2
awarded  Beta
Jul
27
answered Unpredictability of X.509 serial numbers
Jul
25
asked Are there security issues with discrete logarithm keys not being uniformly distributed?
Jul
21
comment Should DES be avoided when developing new systems?
It might be worth distinguishing between CBC and CTR in terms of the problems that are encountered with an n bit cipher. As I understand it, after 2**(n/2) CBC blocks, one can expect to start extracting information about the plaintext, whereas with CTR the only change is that you can distinguish the keystream from a uniform random string, because you would expect to see a collision after 2**(n/2) blocks, but wouldn't with CTR. Obviously the best solution regardless is to use a cipher with a larger block, but I do think these are very different failure modes.
Jul
21
revised Should DES be avoided when developing new systems?
Expand a bit, link to time memory tradeoff paper
Jul
14
answered Is key size the only barrier to the adoption of the McEliece cryptosystem, or is it considered broken/potentially vulnerable?
Jul
14
answered Taking advantage of one-time pad key reuse?
Jul
14
awarded  Scholar