ciphersaber-2 human memorable test vectors

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:15 AM -0800 3/26/02, Adam Back wrote:
>In general purely human readable test vectors are not ideal as they
>are 7 bit, and there have been cases where implementation errors or
>related to the 7th bit (for example one blowfish implementation had
>problems with signd / unsigned chars), but it is kind of an
>interesting though experiment.

If this issue seems to be a problem for a particular cypher, there are a
couple of ways to try to solve it:

* Compress out the eighth bit (requiring 10 characters for a 64 bit block
cypher instead of 8).

* Remember a pattern of high order bits.  Something like 11110000 would be
relatively easy to remember, and would help mitigate signed vs. unsigned
number problems on 32 bit machines.

Cheers - Bill


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