Tales from the Cryptographer

This is (or will someday be) a collection of seemingly trivial results, anecdotes from a cryptographer's life,
and curiosities from practical cryptography and cryptanalysis.
It has been set up in response to a comment by Bart Preneel that there may be cryptanalytical results that
researchers "are aware of right now (but they don't tell anyone because for example they think it is trivial)".
Your own tales are welcome!

• Why public elliptic curve parameters are public
• The cost of forging digital signatures with message recovery

Selected Block Ciphers

• Rijndael, the algorithm.
  
  Check the reference Java implementation in the Locally Available Software section.
  
  

The five AES finalists:

The NESSIE finalists and winners:

A few other algorithms:

Selected Stream Ciphers

Helix (Greg Rose's public domain C implementation) Scream Turing

Selected Hash Functions

RIPEMD-128,160	SHA-1,224,256,384,512	Tiger	WHIRLPOOL

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

Richard Schroeppel's Elliptic Curve and Galois Field Arithmetic page. Richard Schroeppel's et aliorum Crypto'95 paper "Fast Key Exchange with Elliptic Curve Systems". Erik De Win and Bart Preneel's introduction to elliptic curve public-key cryptosystems. Erik De Win's et aliorum ANTS'98 paper "On the performance of signature schemes based on elliptic curves".

Other Asymmetric Cryptosystems

You see, elliptic curves are not the whole story in state-of-the-art asymmetric algorithms...

Digital Signature Algorithms

There is a recent research trend for very short signature sizes.

Locally Available Software

All software published here is in the public domain, but notice that some algorithms may be themselves covered by patents.

Cryptographers and Cryptanalysts

This list is very incomplete.  I intend to make it more comprising (and more organized) in due time.
My apologies for any important (though temporary) omissions!

Material Didático em Português

Alguns textos sobre criptologia em Português, de minha autoria.

• O Ataque Quadrado
  Conceitos básicos sobre criptoanálise integral. Ataque detalhado a versões reduzidas do AES, extensões a outras cifras de bloco, exercícios propostos. (2002)
  


• Curvas Elípticas e Criptografia - Conceitos e Algoritmos
  Uma introdução teórica à criptografia baseada em curvas elípticas. Estruturas algébricas envolvidas, algoritmos fundamentais, tópicos de criptoanálise. (1999)
  

Links

• NIST's Cryptographic Toolkit site
• NESSIE -- New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption.
• The Cryptlib Security Toolkit 
• The GNU Privacy Guard 
• IEEE P1363: Standard for Public-Key Cryptography 
• International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) 
• The OpenSSL Project 
• Wei Dai's Crypto++ Library  Crypto++™

Visits since 1997.12.31:

Last update: 2004.08.25
Copyright © 1998, 2004 by Paulo S. L. M. Barreto.  All rights reserved.