Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Advancements (long-winded)

[William D. N. <wne...@cs...>]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Brian Hurt wrote:

> Blowfish I'm less interested in.  I'm a fan of Twofish myself- especially
> given some of the weaknesses discovered in AES/Rijndael recently...

I share your feelings on Blowfish, but it's still popular and I have an
OCaml interfaced version lying around that I could pretty much copy and
paste into cryptokit.  it  has all sorts of hooks in there for peeking at
and mussing with the internal state, but I might just leave those in for
folks who want to have some fun...

BTW:  Which Rijndael weaknesses are you referring to?  Not the Filiol
mistake (let's be charitable and call it a mistake)?  Or are you referring
to the Courtois & Pieprzyk XSL work?  Or something else?

> I'd like an easy, reasonably fast, library to find primitive polys in
> GF(2^n) for some n.

Hmmm...I'll have to look at that.  I haven't needed it yet (hence its
non-existance in my code), but I could see needing it in the future.  I'm
just not sure if that kind of stuff should really go in a crypto library
though.  It would probably be better to have a number theory/algeba
library that is used by the crypto library instead.

> Is there a Yarrow-based PRNG?

No.  I don't usually care about having a strong source of randomness,
since most of what I do is testing, but I agree that a strong PRNG should
be included in any publicly released version, so I suppose I could add
yarrow (I'd have to look at the code and see when I can fit it into my
schedule, though).

William D. Neumann

---

"Well I could be a genius, if I just put my mind to it.
And I...I could do anything, if only I could get 'round to it.
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