Cubic

If you are in the mood for a not-so-boring "technical novel" (there apparently is now such a thing), may I recommend reading this lovely 730 page book: Engineering Security by Peter "Long-Winded" Gutmann Reading it does require a level of technical expertise and understanding of how SSL/TLS, SSH, IPSec and a number of rather boring protocols work to truly appreciate what he has to say. For those who don't have the time to read 730 pages, I'm going to summarize: Security, or at least the average programmer's understanding of it, is...severely lacking. We've had two decades to figure out how to not screw up security and, yet, we still find new, extraordinarily stupid ways to do so. The real problems are a lack of accountability in software development and that anyone can own a computing device without any training whatsoever. The book then proceeds to attempt to describe fixes for the problems, but I'd wager that around page 50 or so, mo...

Extremely important update: The technique described in this post has been directly confirmed to extend the block size of any symmetric cipher to any desired length by Bruce Schneier himself - he is one of the leading crypto experts in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! On the other hand, the other aspects of this post remain untested, so keep that skepticism handy. However, this post is good news in the event of a major cryptanalysis breakthrough that breaks multiple widely-used and trusted algorithms. Stay tuned...hopefully more good news to come! Before I begin, I need to preface this with the fact that I don't consider myself to be a cryptanalyst. Coming up with a new cryptographic algorithm that is deemed strong is hard to do and really takes a team of people. I know enough to be dangerous. Therefore, what is presented here is to be viewed as merely a theory to extend the block size of any trusted symmetric block cipher without modifying the core algor...