2006_04_01_archive

http://teh-win.blogspot.com/ has (as usual) an amusing read up, which

at one step harps on a point that I can't support enough: 0days !=

hacking. Almost all "real" hacking is done via transitive trust (thus

the same goes for pentests). 0days allow you to more quickly get

_some_ trust to exploit transitively, but the "real" work is done on

transitive trust. And transitive trust and "real" hacking gets too

little credit at security conferences, mainly because any "real"

research here is by direct implication illegal ("... I wrote this worm

that exploits transitive trust ... and I have some empirical data on

it's spreading capabilities *cough* ...").

Now I just need to find a dictionary that explains me what "branler la

nouille en mode noyau" means ;)

posted by halvar.flake at 1:13 PM 4 comments

Publication Economics and Cryptography Research

Something I cannot cease to wonder is why historically there has been

so little published research on the cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

There seem to be millions of articles describing "turning some math

guy's favourite mathematical problem into an asymetric crypto

algorithm" and a similar flood of "fair coin flipping if all

participants are drunk cats and the coin is a ball of yarn"-sort of

papers. All in all, there have been perhabs less than 20 REALLY

important papers in the analysis of symetric crypto in ... uhm ... the

last 10 years (I count hashes as symetric crypto here).

What's the reason for this ?

First of all, symetric crypto tends to not have a "nice" mathematical

structure. This changed somewhat with AES, but almost everything on

the symetric side is rather ugly to look at. Sure, everything can be

written as large multivariate polynomials over GF(2), but that's just

a prettier way of writing a large boolean formulae. So it's hard for

anybody in a math department to justify working on something that is

"like a ring, but not quite, or like a group, but not quite".

Secondly, starting to build a protocol or proposing a new asymetric

cipher is something that a sane researcher (that has not earned tenure

yet) can do in a "short" window of time. Setting out to break a

significant crypto algorithm could very easily lead to "10+ years in

the wilderness and a botched academic career due to a lack of

publications". The result: If you haven't earned tenure yet, and want

to work in crypto, you work on the constructive side.

I find this to be a bit frustrating. I'd like to work on ciphers,

specifically on BREAKING ciphers. I seriously could never get myself

excited about defense. I wouldn't mind spending a few years of my life

on one cipher. But academically, and career wise, this is clear

suicide.

Perhabs we should value "destructive" research more. From my personal

viewpoint, a break in a significant cipher is worth more than 20

papers on fair coin flipping in the absence of gravity. But when it