![[image of Rainy Day]](../images/rain_bw.jpg)
Rainy Day
Sackville, NB, Canada 1995
Mostly likely Nikon F2A, 50 mm lens, Agfapan 400
Rainy Day
Sackville, NB, Canada 1995
Mostly likely Nikon F2A, 50 mm lens, Agfapan 400
The art and science of secret writing, and trying to break the enciphered messages.
See Online Privacy's Cryptography tools and resources, which I maintain (try to) including McTaylor's crypto archive (currently offline) and the clearing-house list of CanCrypt: Canadian Cryptographic Resources. Maybe I will include some essays, manuals, or software that I written, someday.
To follow the news in Cryptography, I watch John Young's Cryptome, and read the cryptography<AT>metzdowd.com mailing list (current archive recent archive, old archive and subscription info), and the monthly Crypto-gram from Bruce Schneier. IEEE Cipher There is also sci.crypt (noisy) and sci.crypt.research (moderated) if you can stand UseNet.
Of course the hottest topics include new standard symmetric block
encryption algorithms announced 2 Oct 2000 by NIST, AES - Rijndael. Another
hot topic is NESSIE - New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption.
Several well-known cryptographers wrote an amicus brief for the DeCSS case (the easily broken DVD "copy" protection). This can already be seen to have a chilling effect on other cryptographers research computer security, as noted by Princeton Computer Science's Secure Internet Programming group (Ed Felton et all) and their SDMI paper that was to be presented at Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop. They have been threated by the RIAA using the DMCA, the same much criticized new law as used in the DeCSS case, and have withheld publishing their paper. Similar breaks of the SDMI audio watermark schemes have been published by a French group.
Useful references include: Usenet sci.crypt FAQs, RSA Security's FAQ, Cryptography A-to-Z from SSH Communications Security Ltd, crypto mini-FAQ (written 2003) by Roger Schlafly, Joe Peschel's site on key recovery, algorithms and their weaknesses, and algorithms page from Kremlin Encryption. Peter Gutmann has a large encryption and security tutorial available. Terry Ritter has a Glossary and Dictionary of Technical Cryptography. John Savard has written an extensive Cryptography Compendium
An amazing reference is the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott Vanstone. Published by CRC Press in 1996, it is also freely available online in PDF.
An useful web site to help find related documents is citeseer from NEC. For laws about cryptography, check Bert-Jaap Koops' Crypto Law Survey. Please note, there are a lot of web pages and stories about older crypto laws still floating around.
Historic materials: Turing's Treatise on Enigma (The Prof's Book) and Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems (scanned copy) by Claude Shannon and an article by Horst Feistel, published in Scientific American, May, 1973, pg 15-23. The revolutionary papers of public key cryptography are available, A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems by Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman, New Directions in Cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman. The GCHQ published the story of Non-Secret Encryption by James Ellis in 1997, and there are other GCHQ publications on Non-Secret Encryption.
For a starting point on classic ciphers, check out the American Cryptogram Association and NORTH DECODER's Crypto Drop Box (mirrored at Crypto Drop Box at ACA) and John Savard's A Cryptographic Compendium.