Re: The Pain of Cryptography

> The firstname "David", and the surname "Wagner" do not necessarily
> unambiguously define a single human being, so I'd not be hugely
> surprised if the trusted cryptographer we all know and love were
> to say "not me guv'". I could just believe "crikey, me brother's
> stag party on 8th Oct was a monster, I don't remember writing that
> at all, I'd even forgotten that I'm a professor at UCB!".
>
> This is secret-key crypto, I'd have thought that the 1600+-bit key
> would have flashed snake-oil warning signs left, right and centre.

That does seem strange.  I just skimmed over the 2003/218 eprint
article.  There are allot of warnings stating that that was just a first
attempt at cryptanalysis and that future work is needed.  Some of the
analysis looks like what our trusted cryptographer would have
written.  But the 1600-bit keys seems fishy, it seems odd that he
would have accepted that (unless he got paid very well to do the
analysis, in which case I would understand why he took the time
to do it).

--Anton