Re: One more fake crypto challenge, $ 5M now: jawstech.com

Laurent Demailly (demailly@Eng.Sun.COM)
Wed, 24 Jun 1998 17:15:32 -0700 (PDT)

• Next message: Lewis McCarthy: "Re: OCR of Skipjack/KEA document being attempted"
• Previous message: Matt Blaze: "difference distribution table for Skipjack"

I got the thing in my mailbox too this morning
it is still on : http://www.sjmercury.com/gmsv/gmsv_morning.shtml
(at the end) and they cite a "Calgary SUN" article
http://www.canoe.ca/CalgaryNews/10_n1.html

Maybe someone should send a small paragraph and a pointer
to the snake oil faq to the column author as an errata for
tomorow ? That might help the awarness on the issue...
(gmsv CC'ed)

> >I thought that the usually good Good Morning Silicon Valley
> >(San Jose Mercury news http://www.mercurycenter.com/gmsv/)
> >would know better but they relayed one more of those
> >dangerous snake oil challenges. It may seem that intent here would be to
> >steal money from naive stock market investors:
>
> Does anyone have a URL for the SJM article? I was up on their web site but
> could not find anything.
[...]
> <sigh> Yet another Snake-oil post.
>
> Such challenges like this are really meaningless and are designed as a
> publicity stunt to gain some free press rather than as a legitimate test
> of the strength of the algorithms involved.
>
> The *only* way to test the security of an algorithm is through a process
> of peer-review of the source code.
>
> Until JAWS Technologies decides to go through this process I would stay
> far away from this and any other products they may produce. It seems quite
> clear that they have little to no understanding of the cryptology &
> security fields.
>
> I don't know what it is about the list but it seems that we must endure
> these snake-oil posts on a periodic basis.
>
> While I have replied here to many of these snake-oil advertisements I have
> yet to see one of these companies post a rebuttal (to the list or
> privately).
>
> I have submitted a copy of the Snake-Oil FAQ to SpyKing requesting that he
> publish it to the list (it's a little long so I don't want to post it
> directly). It can also be found at:
>
> http://www.interhack.net/people/cmcurtin/snake-oil-faq.html
>
> Security & Encryption are the big buzz-words in the computer industry and
> many companies are looking to cash-in on it. Be very wary of Johnny Come
> Lately's who overnight become cryptology "experts".

Laurent Demailly, speaking for himself only

• Next message: Lewis McCarthy: "Re: OCR of Skipjack/KEA document being attempted"
• Previous message: Matt Blaze: "difference distribution table for Skipjack"