Entries Tagged "Schneier news"
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Me Speaking on "The Future of Privacy"
Video of the talk I gave to the Open Right Group last week in London.
Interview with Me
Yet another interview with me. This one is audio, and was conducted in Rotterdam in October.
Bruce Schneier Action Figure
A month ago, ThatsMyFace.com approached me about making a Bruce Schneier action figure. It’s $100. I’d like to be able to say something like “half the proceeds are going to EPIC and EFF,” but they’re not. That’s the price for custom orders. I don’t even get a royalty. The company is working on lowering the price, and they’ve said that they’ll put a photograph of an actual example on the webpage. I’ve told them that at $100 no one will buy it, but at $40 it’s a funny gift for your corporate IT person. So e-mail the company if you’re interested, and if they get enough interest they’ll do a bulk order.
Blowfish in Fiction
The algorithm is mentioned in Von Neumann’s War, by John Ringo and Travis Taylor.
P. 495:
The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a very nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish.
P. 504:
As far as he could tell, at first, it was a simple Denial of Service attack. A DoS occurred when… But this one was different. Every single packet contained some sort of cracking program … Most had dumped to the honey trap, but they were running rampant through there, while others had managed to hammer past two firewalls and were getting to his final line of defense. Somebody had managed a zero day exploit on Blowfish. And more were coming in!
Article on Me
Article on me from a Luxembourg magazine.
Skein News
Skein is one of the 14 SHA-3 candidates chosen by NIST to advance to the second round. As part of the process, NIST allowed the algorithm designers to implement small “tweaks” to their algorithms. We’ve tweaked the rotation constants of Skein. This change does not affect Skein’s performance in any way.
The revised Skein paper contains the new rotation constants, as well as information about how we chose them and why we changed them, the results of some new cryptanalysis, plus new IVs and test vectors. Revised source code is here.
The latest information on Skein is always here.
Tweaks were due today, September 15. Now the SHA-3 process moves into the second round. According to NIST’s timeline, they’ll choose a set of final round candidate algorithms in 2010, and then a single hash algorithm in 2012. Between now and then, it’s up to all of us to evaluate the algorithms and let NIST know what we want. Cryptanalysis is important, of course, but so is performance.
Here’s my 2008 essay on SHA-3. The second-round algorithms are: BLAKE, Blue Midnight Wish, CubeHash, ECHO, Fugue, Grøstl, Hamsi, JH, Keccak, Luffa, Shabal, SHAvite-3, SIMD, and Skein. You can find details on all of them, as well as the current state of their cryptanalysis, here.
In other news, we’re making Skein shirts available to the public. Those of you who attended the First Hash Function Candidate Conference in Leuven, Belgium, earlier this year might have noticed the stylish black Skein polo shirts worn by the Skein team. Anyone who wants one is welcome to buy it, at cost. Details (with photos) are here. All orders must be received before 1 October, and then we’ll have all the shirts made in one batch.
Schneier on "The Future of the Security Industry"
Here’s a video of a talk I gave at an OWASP meeting in August.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.