Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Ok, away from politics, and back to the good stuff. When I left off talking about encryption, we were looking at RSA, as an example of an asymmetric encryption system. Since it's been a while, I'll start off with...
Technorati Tags: cryptography, public-key, encryption, RSA, asymmetric encryption The most successful public key cryptosystem in use today is RSA - named for its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. I first learned about RSA in grad school from one of my...
I've been trying for a couple of weeks to put together a couple of interesting posts on the cryptographic modes of operation for confidentiality and integrity, and I just can't do it. I'm finding it boring to write about,...
In my last cryptography post, I wrote about using message authentication codes (MACs) as a way of guaranteeing message integrity. To review briefly, most ciphers are designed to provide message confidentiality - which means that no one but the...
Now, we're finally reaching the point where the block-cipher stuff gets really fun: block cryptanalysis. As I've explained before, the key properties of a really good encryption system are: It's easy to compute the ciphertext given the plaintext and...
So, as it turned out, I made a major screwup in my post earlier today on modes of operation. Rather than just edit the post, I'm adding a new post with the corrected description of the counter mode, and...
Sorry for the slow pace of the blog lately. I've been sick with a horrible sinus infection for the last month, and I've also been particularly busy with work, which have left me with neither the time nor the...
As promised, now we're going to look at the first major block cipher: the DES. DES stands for "data encryption standard"; DES was the first encryption system standardized by the US government for official use. It's an excellent example...
Where encryption starts getting really interesting, in my opinion, is block ciphers. Block ciphers are a general category of ciphers that are sort of a combination of substitution and transposition ciphers, and sort of something entirely different. They're really...
The second major family of encryption techniques is called transposition ciphers. I find transposition ciphers to be rather dull; in their pure form, they're very simple, and not very difficult to crack, even without computers. But some of the...