Schneier on Security

I've always wondered, what's in it for the winning algorithm? Is it just the honour? Or will NIST purchase a ''license'' in some form?

These tweaks looks good.

Also t-shirt business.

A recent study (http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/438) attacks Skein up to 35 rounds out of 72. Would you please give comments on it? Thanks!

"Blue Midnight Wish".
Is there a secret to coming up with these names? Something that makes the quoted not be sorta ridiculous? I mean, no one will ever say they used Blue Midnight Wish for anything, and calling it BMW doesn't seem to really do the trick either... At least "Blowfish" has a good ring to it....

Revision files still not posted to skein-hash.info, 404s all around. Reading your local copy here.

A quick google doesn't give much info on cipher modes with tweakable block ciphers. Does anyone know if theres been much work in that direction?

@greg:
It's probably named like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/books/...

Also known as "Do you want your grandchildren to say you were in Blue Spoon?"

Whoops! The above was a reply to NotSoAnonymousWhenOnline

Bruce, you should know that this page won't load on Firefox - it just gives an error, "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.", and will not load the page at all, let alone allowing me to read or post comments.

i have viewed these blogs for a long time with firefox without any problems.

The issue seems to be cleared up in any case.

The winning algorithm will presumably be known as SHA-3, and its name during the contest will fade away. AES was formerly known as Rijndael; at least Blue Midnight Wish is easier to pronounce.

Blue Midnight Wish makes me think of Harold and The Purple Crayon.

nice_dude3: I think Schneiers submissions in past competitions like this and his experience working in the field of cryptology more than makes up for not having a career in the university world.

With that said I actually dont know if Schneier has a Ph.D or not :-)

@nice_dude3

You dont need to be qualified in any way to make a SHA-3 Submission, among the Submitters was even a 15 year old:
http://www.cio.com/article/461164/...

@ Daniel Wijk,

"With that said I actually dont know if Schneier has a Ph.D or not :-)"

It does not mater, I have posted about this in the past.

A Ph.D is not like a "taught" degree (BSc, MSc etc) it is for "research ability".

As many older Ph.D's will grudgingly admit their research choice was "kind of made for them" by those assessing them.

The big problem with a Ph.D is that the research is normaly a small increment on existing knowledge and often lacks any real originality.

This is due in part to the people assessing you, they have little way to judge highly original work.

But a pertanent question to ask is not "Has Bruce a Ph.D?" but "Is there a Ph.D for Bruce's originality?".

As far as "standing" in the "field of endeveor" I think Bruce has proved himself way beyond what most Ph.D's could ever hope to do.

Also I suspect that his work on his various systems and the "writing up" he has done would be regarded as sufficient by many.

Clive Robinson: I agree, there is few people in his field that we have knowledge about who can speak with authority on these matters and come out as credible as Bruce.

@Bruce 'an additional input that can be used to "personalize" the cipher"

So roughly the same notion as a salt?

@David: With Threefish at least, you can have a different tweak for each block of each message without a performance hit, which isn't true of all salts. For instance, a tweak could be helpful for making a secure but still parallelizable mode for hard disk encryption.

That's quite the sexy t-shirt model.