[Cryptography] Crypto Standards v.s. Engineering habits - Was: NIST about to weaken SHA3?

[Bill Frantz]

On 10/15/13 at 11:56 PM, iang at iang.org (ianG) wrote:

>At a reduction level, we often hope that we can improve a 
>cipher by xoring another cipher with it.  But this amounts to 
>"inventing" a new cipher, so it seems to reduce to a sort of 
>absurdium argument that an xoring programmer can outdo a cryptographer.

Well, lets be careful if they are both stream cyphers. And 
downright scared if they are both the same stream cypher. :-)

Layering a stream cypher on top of a block mode cypher seems a 
better bet. Even if the block mode is CBC. BTW, AES in counter 
mode is a stream cypher.

[I like the direction John is proposing, even if I haven't had 
time to chase down the modes he's suggesting.]

Cheers - Bill

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