Crystalline Cipher and cryptography snakeoil
Martijn Grooten on Twitter (with his signature sarcastic undertone) posed a weekend challenge for anyone interested in cryptography: have fun with Crystalline Cipher and show that it is fundamentally broken. Now, I've met with Martijn only once, but from that meeting I gathered that he really loves mathematics, at least as much as I do, and has a great understanding of cryptography. This whole business with Crystalline started off with the discussion on irtf.org , when the cipher author was convincing everyone that he discovered the best cipher in the world. But to Martijn, mailing list members and me the cipher has a smell of snakeoil. Since this weekend turned out to be rather free for me, I decided to have a go at cryptoanalysis. Mind you, I'm not in any way formally trained in cryptography. I've had two one semester long cryptography courses - one from more mathematical standpoint and the other one from more technical standpoint. The most complex cryptographic ...