Re: Ada Connections to this Crypto.

[Austin Obyrne <austin.obyrne@hotmail.com>]

On Monday, December 15, 2014 7:06:56 PM UTC, Mark Carroll wrote:
> Austin Obyrne <austin.obyrne@hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> > The bottom line has to be "Where are the ciphers that all these clever readers have written? - there blowing in their own wind can be the only answer - there's pedantry, politics and petulance, vicious personal attacks but no ciphers"
> >  A bit like the golfer who has a lovely set of clubs, polishes the bag , cleans and polishes his shoes, buys some snazzy outfits with a white cap, knows the rules of the game inside out panders to club politics with lots of 'me too' stuff but never hits a ball.
> 
> Not really. I would have loved to developed worthwhile ciphers. In some
> of my master's program work I developed software for generating and
> assessing block ciphers; only last year I worked on an idea for
> automating differential cryptanalysis to assist in my ideas for creating
> ciphers. (It failed miserably.) I am /not/ offering cipher designs
> because I have read enough and learned enough and tried enough to have
> found that I am simply not good enough at it: that other people in the
> field are far more skilled than I am, and that I still don't understand
> the theory well enough to devise ciphers and provide credible assurance
> of their security.
> 
> I'm not like a golfer who panders to club politics, I'm like a golfer
> who likes the game but after a lot of trying and even two rounds of
> classes still can't even hit the ball reliably and realizes that his
> efforts are best applied elsewhere. I wouldn't have responded to you at
> all had you not been persistently filling an Ada group -- something I
> /am/ interested in reading about -- with your peculiar assertions and
> misapprehensions, which I've made a good-faith constructive effort to
> help you move past.
> 
> -- Mark

Hi Mark,

I don't profess to be anything in the way of an Ada developer or a cryptography developer but when one comes up with an algorithm that is demonstrably irreversible then that's it  - the mathematics don't lie and the mathematician cannot lie successfully in the face of all the known and time proven theorems.  It's simple - anybody even a person totally unrelated to cryptography can come up with a successful algorithm - a cab driver, a doctor of medicine, anybody.  There is no apprenticeship to be served, no defence to be made for having tried, no need to vindicate oneself to so-called pros - all it needs is the mathematical proof.

Spotting bases for algorithms is an art.  It helps if one has a very broad background of *Applied maths and even then there is a specially aptitude needed.  One never sets out to write an algorithm - you keep the general idea in your head and when opportunity knocks you answer by doggedly pursuing even the slightest whiff of an idea - figment of the imagination, conjecture, copious testing, claim, theorem - that's the order.

In my view there are no associates (camp followers) of cryptography - you are in it to write algorithms - nothing else.

Mt background is in ship propulsion - I was Chief Engineer in the British Merchant Navy for most of my life - I also have a very large background in power generation stations , factories. Inspection work and much more.

My basic career qualification is more of a License (Ministry of Transport Certificate of Competency as Chief Engineer) to operate rather than an academic one and it follows an apprenticeship at the bench.  I attained a Fellowship of my Institute followed by Chartered Engineer Registration (40 years ago)  and I have studied Pure and Applied Maths on a Degree course at University.

I was pitched into cryptography accidentally when I asked another mathematician to read my invention of 'vector factoring'.  

None of this is important to the ciphers in hand - the point I am making is that the skill of spotting algorithms is dependent to a great extent on one's creative instincts in mathematics.

I my view proper cryptography does not yet exist - it will come eventually and like everything else that lasts it will be underpinned by well-established decimal mathematical methods.

Of the three disciplines that are involved i.e. cryptography, mathematics and programming the most important one is the one comes naturally to some of us - that is the  ability to spot algorithms - it can be acquired with time by others but it must be there somehow in order to write cipher algorithms.

Everything else that purports to be worth posting is just playing with the box that cryptography comes in.

No. I am not a 'nutcase' to be humoured good-naturedly - that's the face-saving escape hatch for the under-achievers to brand me as such.  Its quite amusing to hear the no-hopers spouting on about my perceived shortcomings not having written anything of note themselves.

adacrypt.