The Basics of Cryptology

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The Basics of Cryptology

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Mike C SSC-Insane Points: 23224 More actions · Answer 1

Thanks Chris, I wrote this as an introductory article to the subject and I'm glad you found it interesting. I submitted one more on this topic that is a short intro to the mechanics of modern encryption algorithms. It goes into a little more detail about the theory and implementation of computer encryption. I hope you find that one useful as well.

Thanks again!

veer SSC Enthusiast Points: 177 More actions · Answer 2

"Discussions never End" -veer

Keep up the great work and use the feedback from all others and come out with more articles on this subject.

THanks in Advance...

"Every Initiation process has the biggest resistance that is why they need extra Energy" -Veer

Brian Hickey Valued Member Points: 62 More actions · Answer 3

Interesting article and well done. There is a cryptographic time warp, however. I read the article today - 8/10/2006 and all comments are from 2005 - LOL!

Next article might be about generating your own application key (Banks - as the author certainly knows) require certain basic levels of encryption on data fields and we can generate many good keys to encrypt and decrypt with (3DES as one example). All we need is a seed and a vector and we can generate some really awesome encryption.

Mike C SSC-Insane Points: 23224 More actions · Answer 4

Hi Brian,

For some reason I'm not receiving emails from my threads here anymore (need to check my settings I guess), so I didn't see this one until just now. I've actually written an article on SQL 2005 encryption that talks about the ANSI X9.17 standard and how SQL 2005's encryption parallels its key security model. SQL 2005 has the ability to take a password/passphrase and "mangle" it using hash functions and a bunch of bit level manipulations to generate keys that are quite un-reverse-engineerable.

Generating your own encryption keys is a heckuva subject to get into though Random number generation functions in most computer languages aren't considered to be up to the task of generating encryption keys, and to do the job right you'd need some specialized software or hardware. I've done some work in the area with various algorithms - one of my favorites is the "Twister" random number generation algorithm, because it is simple and does a decent job (it was created by professional statisticians). I believe Schneier points out in his book though, that if you want true random numbers you really have to hook your computer up to some sort of subatomic particle detection device and rely on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to do the rest

If I have time one day I'll pull together information on some of these approaches and maybe put together some sample key generation code as well.

Thanks!