Re: AES HDD encryption was XOR
Victor Duchovni writes: -+- | The computing power of the microprocessor is still under | 32 powers of 2 from its inception, naive extrapolation | to the next 32 powers of 2 is unwise. Well taken, indeed. But what I am myself interested in is the relationship of the three main up-curves, Moore's for CPU horsepower per unit of money, and its two un-named siblings for storage and for bandwidth. As I read the tea-leaves, storage is doubling at perhaps a 12-month rate while bandwidth is faster still. Yes, these are laboratory figures, but the lab is where the action is. This tells me, I think, that the future of computing is ever more data-rich but, at the same time, that that data-richness is eclipsed by ever-increasing data-mobility. Suppose the doubling times are 18/12/9; then a decade is two orders of magnitude for CPU, three for storage, and four for bandwith. I do not see how this does not radically alter the economically optimal computing infrastructure or, for that matter, the nature of the problems we here are collectively paid to solve. This is, of course, all irrelevant if and when the Singularity occurs. Kurzweil's guess of 2035 is 27 years away, which is to say 18 powers of two out, not 32. Perhaps relevant to this list, imagine that the research described here: http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/mg20026805.500-cultured-robots- make-sweet-music-together--.html was of two programs creating not music but a cipher. Thinking out loud, --dan [ just for amusement, 2008 world production of wheat and rice would each cover 53 squares, with maize coming in at 51 squares ] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: CPRNGs are still an issue.
Jack Lloyd wrote: I think the situation is even worse outside of the major projects (the OS kernels crypto implementations and the main crypto libraries). I think outside of those, nobody is even really looking. For instance - This afternoon I took a look at a C++ library called JUCE which offers (among a pile of other things) RSA and Blowfish. However it turns out that all of the RSA keys are generated with an LCRNG (lrand48, basically) seeded with the time in milliseconds. http://www.randombit.net/bitbashing/security/juce_rng_vulnerability.html If one uses a higher resolution counter - sub microsecond - and times multiple disk accesses, one gets true physical randomness, since disk access times are effected by turbulence, which is physically true random. In Crypto Kong I added entropy at various times during program initialization from the 64 bit performance counter. Unfortunately the 64 bit performance counter is not guaranteed to be present, so I also obtained entropy from a wide variety of other sources - including the dreaded millisecond counter that has caused so many security holes. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Why the poor uptake of encrypted email? [Was: Re: Secrets and cell phones.]
-- We discovered, however, that most people do not want to manage their own secrets StealthMonger wrote: This may help to explain the poor uptake of encrypted email. There is very good uptake of skype and ssh, because those impose no or very little additional cost on the end user. Secret management is almost furtively sneaked in on the back of other tasks. It would be useful to know exactly what has been discovered. Can you provide references? It is informal knowledge. A field has references when it is a science, or attempting to become a science, or pretending to become a science. Security is not yet even an art. Cryptography is an art that dubiously pretends to science, but the weak point of course is interaction of humans with the cryptography, in which area we have not even the pretense of art. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
