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Open Sourcing FNR an Experimental Block Cipher

posted by janrinok on Monday June 23 2014, @08:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-would-have-trusted-them-if-it-hadn't-been-opened? dept.

AnonTechie writes:

CISCO is offering up an experimental cipher which, among other things, could help preserve the anonymity of data in cloud environments. In putting what it calls "FNR" (Flexible Naor and Reingold) into the hands of the public ( http://blogs.cisco.com/security/open-sourcing-fnr-an-experimental-block-cipher/ ), CISCO says its work is currently experimental rather than production software.

The FNR specification, described here ( http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/421.pdf ) (PDF), explains that privacy of fixed-length fields (such as collected in NetFlow formats) is an emerging challenge for cloud providers, who collect lots of telemetry for analysis and don't want to change their field formats to encrypt the information.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:56AM (#59209)

    They released it under LGPLv2, which states:

    Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that companies distributing free software will individually obtain patent licenses, thus in effect transforming the program into proprietary software. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

  • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:13PM

    by Open4D (371) on Tuesday June 24 2014, @01:13PM (#59366) Journal

    Interesting. But if Cisco offers other people a certain licence to some software, on the condition that the licensees don't abuse relevant patents, does that condition also apply to Cisco, the licensor?

    • (Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:51PM

      by etherscythe (937) on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:51PM (#59558) Journal

      Theoretically, perhaps. Realistically, Cisco will never sue Cisco over it, which is the enforcement mechanism. They're not quite as dumb as Sony [upenn.edu] (yet?)

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