In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Perry E. Metzger" writes: >There is a profession called "cryptographer" out there. They are the >folks who try out these new ideas, and they fill lots of conference >proceedings with their new ideas, including things like crypto modes >designed specifically for disk encryption.
There is a world out here that's called the IT industry. When they badly needed a new password scrambler nobody from that cryptographic discipline could be bothered with a problem already long since solved in their academic journals and the task fell to a more or less random programmer in the end. Today that algorithm, with all its flaws, seems to protect a very good sized chunk of the passwords on the internet: All cisco routers, all FreeBSD systems, the majority of Linux systems etc etc etc. At the time where I wrote GBDE, the best that was offered was CGD (and similar) and users (not cryptographers!) didn't trust it and history have so far repeated. I am not claiming that things couldn't be done smarter than GBDE, but I do notice an distinct lack of attempts to do so from the cryptographic establishment. I can add another property of the elite society of cryptographers: if you are not a card carrying member of their society, the majority of their members can not even be bothered to reply to an email from an outsider. This does hamper communiation a bit. Maybe the problem is that cryptographers, like true computer scientists, write in nothing less portable than pencil number two ? If some card-carrying member of the cryptographic establishment were to offer the Open Source operating systems an implementation which were approved by all (or some qualified quorum of) the high priests of their brother hood, then I am sure that it would be received with praise and thanks of no end. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
