Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cryptography/Archive 2

message: I am thinking of merging these three small articles Matyas-Meyer-Oseas hash, Davies-Meyer hash and Miyaguchi-Preneel hash into one single more detailed article called something like Hash functions based on block ciphers. Similar to how all block cipher modes are described in the one article Block cipher modes of operation. I will reuse some of the text about hash functions based on block ciphers I wrote in Cryptographic hash function. Any comments or point of views? --David Göthberg 01:09, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's a good suggestion. It'd be easier to compare them, rather than have to flick between several short articles. — Matt Crypto 08:06, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Yay!  As a mergist, I totally agree.  Plus, this would allow us to give some coverage to important work in that area other than those three constructions, like the Preneel-Govaerts-Vanderwaal result for instance.  Mangojuice 21:06, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hash functions based on block ciphers 

message: I took the freedom of updating/extending the Template:Cryptographic hash functions and adding it to some more pages, like the obvious page: Cryptographic hash function. I also noted that there is no template for MACs. But since a MAC template would be very small and MACs and hashes are so closely related I instead suggest that the Template:Cryptographic hash functions is extended to also include MACs. Also it would perhaps encourage any one that reads about hashes to learn a little about MACs too. I suggest extending the template like this: 
* Title changed to "Cryptographic hash functions and Message authentication codes (MACs) - edit". (But no change to the template name/URL.)
* "Algorithms:" changed to "Hash algorithms:".
* Adding "MAC algorithms:".
If no one disagrees I will do this extension in some days. 
Oh, and a note to Matt Crypto while I am at it: Stay on your wikibreak and take care of your wife, we'll take care of this place meanwhile! :))
--David Göthberg 13:03, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So, since no one protested I have now added MACs to the hash template and added the template to all MAC articles. While I were at it I also created a MAC category: :Category:Message authentication codes. --David Göthberg 21:18, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hash template and MACs 

message: Oh and I did a minor fix to the  template. I added a  tag so it doesn't put itself so very close to the last line of text in the pages it is used on.
--David Göthberg 14:00, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure. I probably preferred it without the space (in line with most other stub tags), but I don't care enough to quibble ;-) — Matt Crypto 14:33, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Aouch, and I who thought every one must be anoyed with the stubs squesing so tight to the last row. Ah well, lets se what the others think before I revert myself. --David Göthberg 16:45, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Crypto stub template 

message: Just back from SASC 2006.  There was some interesting discussion there about the problem of "smoke without fire" - that is, cryptanalytic attacks which have no validity, but which make the general public afraid of using the cipher because they're not able to assess that the attacks are not valid.  I know that those who sell licenses to patented algorithms feel particularly strongly about this danger, but it's a difficulty for the whole community.  The example everyone gave was Li An-Ping's attacks on Salsa20, but it's a general problem.  Do you have any thoughts on how Wikipedia can respond positively to give an accurate impression to the public without violating the usual rules of NPOV, verifiability, and so forth?  Thanks! — ciphergoth 11:12, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: (I hope you don't mind; I've duplicated this post this to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cryptography). If a result has been published in a reputable, peer-reviewed place, then I would think we can safely assert the result without hesitation (unless it's been challenged elsewhere, of course). If it's not been peer-reviewed, we should probably hedge it along the lines of "In 2006, Smith claimed to have found an attack on SmegoCrypt...", and then add the response to it by the algorithm's designers as soon as it's available, or any other (reasonable) skeptical claims. We could even add a clause along the lines of "the result has not yet been published" if the author of the attack hasn't got a particularly convincing reputation. One of the benefits of Wikipedia is that it can be cutting edge, but, as you point out, the flip side is that we don't want to encourage the spread of rumours. — Matt Crypto 15:28, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I remember Bob Silverman having a major problem with this issue in the use of "strong primes" for RSA encryption: it's preventing an attack that would be dumb to worry about.  Take a look at the safe prime article, where I tried to inject a little perspective on the importance of safe/strong primes for factoring.  Although the view that strong primes are unnecessary for RSA has been published, I think it doesn't need to be to put two verifiable facts together: that (1) strong primes are required for RSA to make the number less vulnerable to certain factoring methods such as Pollard-rho, and (2) Pollard-rho is much less efficient for average numbers than general purpose methods like the number field sieve.  What couldn't be added is that (3) therefore, requiring strong primes is stupid: that's POV and unverifiable, even if it's the natural conclusion from (1) and (2).  I think a similar thing could be used anytime there's a "smoke without fire" kind of situation.  Another useful point: we should never describe something as "broken:" if an attack is worth including, it's worth explaining it, which helps prevent people from getting too panicked.  Mangojuice 21:22, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smoke without fire 

message: I am thinking of making an article about the Merkle-Damgård structure. 
When I made the article Hash functions based on block ciphers I noticed that that article needed an explanation of the Merkle-Damgård structure. So I copied the Merkle-Damgård section from Cryptographic hash function. However some guys in the crypto chat I spend time in read it and missunderstood the length padding so I expanded the explanation in a way they understood. Now that section has become rather large. And the same expanded explanation would be needed in the Cryptographic hash function article too. So instead of having the same long section in two articles it would probably be better to move it to a separate article and just have a short resumé in the other articles and the usual link to "Main article: Merkle-Damgård construction". 
So, what do you guys think about it?
--David Göthberg 22:51, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, and thanks for bing willing to undertake it. Good for you. ww 06:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, the article is done. Hope you guys like it. --David Göthberg 03:43, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merkle-Damgård article? 

message: * Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nicolas Courtois. — Matt Crypto 11:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion discussion alert

message: I tried finding an article that talked about the subject of MIX-nets, but don't see one.  I'm not knowledgible enough to write one but would like to see it added as a consideration for the crypto project.  Here's the initial paper by David Chaum from 1981 and there has been much work since: David Chaum. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 24(2):84–88, 1981.
:Ah yes, Mix nets is an important concept. We do have articles about Onion routing and Tor which are more or less the same ideas. Since I have some knowledge in the area I might look into it properly some day. For now I think redirects from Mix net and/or Mix networks to Onion routing would be ok. Do the rest of you guys think that would be ok? --David Göthberg 10:43, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  MIX nets 

message: The article on Smithy code seems rather limited and borders on trivia. Would it be better incorporated into an article on the variant Beaufort which doesn't seem to exist at the moment? GraemeLeggett 14:48, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't think so.  The Smithy code is probably not important enough to cover very much in an article on the variant Beaufort, if one existed, and there are links to this article from The DaVinci Code and from the judge's page.  The article seems decently written and sourced, and WP is not paper, so it might as well stay.  Mangojuicetalk 14:52, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Smithy code]] 

message: I dont understand why this huge project does not involve anything for the beginners!!! I am sure that many beginners surely refer to wikipedia... and what they would have found is nothing but codes and algorithms that are totally beyond their reach!! Please help the Newbies. This is a humble request
:Because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and thus striving for precise and factual information; Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information (a book, a collection of tutorials, manuals, FAQs or guides). Anyone is, of course, welcome to write an introductory book about cryptography on Wikibooks and refer to it on Wikipedia (from relevant articles). However, that's out Wikipedia's scope. -- intgr 13:10, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the "humble request". Obviously much of cryptography is highly technical, but I think there is room to make basic articles more accessible.--agr 14:15, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I might have been overly critical since I assumed that a request for "something for the beginners" implied practical cryptography. That is, practical "howto"s or guides, which I can't see fitting into an encyclopedia. As for accessibility, I agree. Every article on Wikipedia has room for improvement, and articles about cryptography in particular tend to be quite technical. -- intgr 14:29, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually guys, I think I disagree. There are several articles, albeit mostly on what we call classical crypto, which are suited to beginners. I know I've been tugging in the direction of accessible by the Average Reader in the crypto corner the entire time I've been here, and though I often seel like Sisyphysis (sp?), there are probably some other folks who have been doing so as well. Try Cryptography, History of Cryptography, Substitution cipher, polyapphabetic cipher, and so on. All that said, I tend to agree with Intgr above about how-tos being not good WP fodder. ww 22:32, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  For the beginners 

message: I would like to alert this community to the fact that Wikisource has decided to delete all reference data, some of which is of interest to this project. This raises the question of whether some of this material should be hosted at Wikipedia. See [] for a list. There aren't that many of them and I think they have value here. Articles to be deleted include some Elliptic curve algorithms, test vectors for Blowfish and RC4, and Diceware word lists in English and German. I have a personal interest in the last two (I am the compiler of the English list) so it would be best for me to stay out of that discussion.--agr 15:30, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: AR, I've reviewed the discussion which resulted in the exclusion policy under which these articles are being deleted. Twice. And i find myself lost. If the FIPS Pubs related to crypto are included I can't see the problem. They are public domain, important to public policy (at least in aggregate) and some of them are very important (eg the DES and AES standards). I think the decision to exclude maths got out of hand. I didn't see that policy defended in the discussion, and the summary voted upon (or its interpretation a few commments later) seems to have gone awry. Very odd. Should one protest at WS? Should one just transfer the material (much of which is gone when I looked) to WP? Extremely odd. When I end up in this lost condition, I usually find there's an internally contradictory situation. And I think the same has happened here, the contradction being between a remit to include Sources and some hostility to complex stuff (like math and its typography). ww 08:31, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not happy with the situation, but the editors who maintain Wikisource have decided to delete reference material that was previously considered part of the Wikisource mission. Their best argument is that they do not feel competent to maintain material that isn't essentially a book. That said, FIPS PUBS would appear fall under what is still allowed, as I understand things. Were there FIPS PUBS on Wikisource before? If so, do you know happen their title?--agr 11:35, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes any transcriptions of a publication (with acceptable license of course) are still allowed.  The data listed for exclusion had no such sources listed.  I believe it was user compiled.  If it was a publication however I would be happy to restore it. There are links to lists of what was deleted in the Scriptorium disscussion.  There may be red links to things that were not necessarily deleted, as no one ever cleaned up the index pages on many of these topics after the language split.  I am not sure that that situation necessarily applies to cryptograpy though.  Any titles you are unsure of I can examine for deleted edits.--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 11:46, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  All reference material to be deleted from Wikisource 

message: I took the liberty to slightly change the layout of our navigation boxes. I moved the "edit button" on them from the top center position to the top right corner instead. I tried the layout on some people and they  prefered that. I hope you guys like it too. You can see the boxes on the bottom of our main project page. --David Göthberg 22:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I like it. Cheers! — Matt Crypto 15:58, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Crypto navigation boxes (templates) 

message: Just dropping by here to note that I'm impressed by the high quality I almost invariably encounter when stumbling across cryptography-related articles in Wikipedia. Kudos to all contributors. Is there still active work on the cryptography WikiReader? Fredrik Johansson 10:15, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: High quality

message: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/17/1522236 — Matt Crypto 07:39, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Slashdot on CryptoDox

message: Hi everyone! As you might have seen I have made some rework of our navigational templates. I'd like to have some feedback/comments/views on how they should be used. Everything I am talking about here is visible in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography#Navigational_templates. Here are my suggestions and questions:
1: We now have a "main crypto navigation box" below all the other navigation boxes with links to the main/basic pages. I hope every one like that?
2: We of course need to ponder exactly what that main box should contain. So far it just contains my suggestions. But I suggest we keep it fairly short and don't fill it with many links.
3: I suggest we use that "main crypto navigation box" on ALL crypto pages.
4: Regarding the small "Cryptography portal" box (the one with the yellow key in): I should mention that I don't use portals anywhere so I have no feel for portal stuff. So I have no idea how and how much we should "advertise" the portal. We now have a link to the portal from the main box so all pages with a crypto navigation box do link to the portal. However I have realised that link is not especially visible. So perhaps we should use that portal box in many or even all "See also" sections on all crypto pages? It seems to be inline with what Frap has been doing lately. But my only point of view is that we should NOT add it to the top of articles, instead only to the "See also" section and if there is no such section to one of the other lower sections or in lack of that even skip the box on that page.
Well, that was all. Sorry for filling up this page faster than it seems you people have time to answer. --David Göthberg 13:05, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nice work with the templates, keep up the good stuff. Although (1) I like it, (3) I don't know if we should use a navigation box on all pages. It wouldn't hurt. Maybe just those that would fall within a "topic" (like "stream" or "hash" etc), which, of course, is still a large proportion. (4) I think we should avoid promoting the crypto portal heavily. I agree that it shouldn't be on the top of crypto articles. Personally, I feel we shouldn't use it in many articles at all (exceptions being Cryptography, and maybe a couple of others). — Matt Crypto 17:51, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Navigational template usage 

message: Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory.  This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you.  B2T2 00:02, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Project directory