Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!daveb
From: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: sci.crypt
Subject: Re: Request for opinions: canadian cryptographic standard.
Message-ID: <2475@geac.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 88 19:04:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: geac.2475
Posted: Mon Mar 21 14:04:52 1988
References: <2463@geac.UUCP> <17654@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Organization: Dave, being dave for a change.
Lines: 25


|In article <2463@geac.UUCP> max@syntron (Max Southall) writes:
||  proprietary Canadian algorithm should be embedded into LSI, and the
||  details shared with no one outside Canada.  

In article <17654@watmath.waterloo.edu> gamiddleton@watmath.waterloo.edu (Guy Middleton) writes:
| Having an algorithm without trapdoors for nasty foreign intelligence
| agencies is a good idea, but keeping the details of the algorithm secret is
| a bad way to make it secure.  At some time, *somebody* will find out, and
| all the secrecy will be pointless.  It is better to assume that the enemy
| knows everything about the encryption method except for the key.

  Perhaps we should have made the LSI-embedding proprietary, or some
other mechanism for going from algorithm to the actual processing
proprietary.
  The concern here is the easy availability of chipsets for doing
parallell brute-force attacks on the encoded data.  Not the
algorithm proper's security.

 --dave (sorry, guy!) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.                 {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
 Geac Computers International Inc.,   |  Computer Science loses its
 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, |  memory (if not its mind) 
 CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 |  every 6 months.