Re: Cryptanalysis (was Re: TEA (was Re: filesystem encryption))

Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com)
Wed, 01 Jul 1998 20:52:41 -0500

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At 03:14 PM 6/29/98 -0400, Matt Blaze wrote:
>
>Perry is completely right here.
>
>Designing ciphers is hard. There's no general theory of cipher
>design. Even very smart, knowledgeable, experienced people come up
>with bad ciphers. In the crypto community, people aren't even all
>that embarrassed when their algorithms get broken. That's how hard
>it is.

For the record, I should point out that Matt is speaking from experience.
In 1995 Matt and I presented a cipher called MacGuffin at FSE 2 (an
algorithms workshop). It was broken even before we presented it, by the
hosts of the conference. This is the way the science works.

Bruce
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