[Cryptography] New Encryption Standard of the Russian Federation GOST Grasshopper

[grarpamp]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 1:39 PM, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
> On 2/01/2015 11:37 am, Eric Filiol wrote:
>> The Russian Federation has recently published (in Russian only) the
>> tchnical description of its new Encryption Standard.
>> I have translated the document into English and implemented this
>> algorithm in C (under GPLv3).
>> http://cvo-lab.blogspot.fr/2015/01/the-new-gost-standard-from-russian.html
>
> *Interesting* and it would be very interesting to hear what the real
> cryptographers think of the Russian cryptographer's invention!  Good work!

So there are no real Russian cryptos? Umm.

> fair and open competition) did the net voluntarily swing to AES.

The competition was part of the swing, so was govt's saying
AES(256) was good for TOP SECRET (not that they use it over their
own suites), so was it's speed/hardware/simplicity.

> What do people say?  Should GOST be supported in SSL? Is there any merit in
> the "national government mandates" argument?

There are govt laws for what the govt itself will only use.
 (Are you going to not sell to and profit from that govt?)
There are govt laws for what the populace will only use.
 (Are you going to jail for breaking that ban, or will you bow?)
There are paths between all the laws for what obediant
 users can use.
And rebels will use whatever they want.

If you personally use crap ciphers, that's your own problem.
If you support (absent force of law) crap ciphers, or more
than the best few in each class such that community has no
time to properly analyze them all, that's a community problem.
If you don't resist crap law, crap ciphers, or the spawning of endless
new ciphers of the month just because, that's a community problem.