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Re: [Cfrg] RE: Where's the beef?

Alex Alten <Alten@attbi.com> Fri, 30 August 2002 20:57 UTC

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Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 13:55:19 -0700
To: daw@mozart.cs.berkeley.edu, cfrg@ietf.org
From: Alex Alten <Alten@attbi.com>
Subject: Re: [Cfrg] RE: Where's the beef?
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At 07:44 PM 8/30/2002 GMT, David Wagner wrote:
>Alex Alten  wrote:
>>This is a pity, because the best minds in the crypto world will not work
>>for free, [...]
>
>You're wrong.

I stand corrected by one of those minds.  :-}.
(This is said with all due respect for your considerable talent.)

I had a conversation with Peter Schweitzer about this last year, whom
I consider damn near the best cryptanalyst in the USA, and I'm fairly
sure he does not ever work for free.

He was pretty adamant about doing things step by step before publicly
publishing something.  Doing good analysis is hard work.  This is not
like publishing an analysis of something like WEP or SSL where you
could get great mileage out of the resulting publicity.  I'm talking
about doing this sort of work before publishing it.  The closest free
thing I can think of is the Twofish effort for NIST's AES.  But, again
there was prestige to be gained by the team for publishing even a runner
up design.  Here, most likely, a lot of RFCs will be rather obscure,
tucked away in some reference slot in a Standard RFC.  Are you willing
to do this heavy lifting, not for just one informational RFC, but say a
dozen or more?

I've been on the engineering side of the world too long.  I guess I
don't have the right mindset for IRTF.

- Alex


--

Alex Alten
Alten@ATTBI.com

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