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Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
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.
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:52 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:29 AM • 16 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:36 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:21 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:07 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 7:23 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:13 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:11 AM • 18 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:36 PM • 14 Comments •
Category: Encryption
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 7:10 PM • 11 Comments •
