Secure Science issues preview of their upcoming block cipher

Dan Kaminsky dan at doxpara.com
Fri Mar 25 16:32:27 EST 2005


>Have you looked at their scheme?
>  http://www.securescience.net/ciphers/csc2/
>The way to come up with a cipher provably as secure as AES-128 is to use
>AES-128 as part of your cipher -- but their scheme does not do anything
>like that.
>
>I am very skeptical about claims that they have a mathematical proof that
>CS2-128 is as secure as AES-128.  I want to see the proof.
>  
>
Backstory:

    Secure Science is basically publishing a cipher suite implemented by
Tom St. Denis, author of Libtomcrypt.  Though not the most ...
diplomatic of characters haunting sci.crypt, the guy's quite bright, is
an absurdly prolific author (has quite literally written several hundred
page books documenting use of Libtomcrypt and mechanisms for
multiprecision math), and can be expected to generate cool things in the
years to come.

    As for the manner of this cipher's publication...Tom actually did
release the paper some time ago.  See eprint @
http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/085 .  Lance has Tom on staff, and...well,
sort of blew the announce.  He understands rather well the error of his
ways, and is in all sorts of damage control.

    So, quick summary -- yes, that's a very cranky way to announce a
cipher, no, it's not a crank cipher.

--Dan


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