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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, @07:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:05AM (#59273)

    If the NSA was in possession of a practical break of AES and allowed the US government to use it for classified information anyway, then that would be the height of stupidity and arrogance. Do you really think that they are so stupid and arrogant as to believe that they cannot be penetrated by another foreign intelligence agency or whistleblower (FYI, they already have), or that someone, somewhere, be it the academic community or their counterparts elsewhere, will not independently discover their break? The NSA has been accused of many things, but stupid is not one of them. No, my guess is that they would have done A instead, as they did back in the days of DES, when some apparently suspicious changes they made to the DES s-boxes resulted in the algorithm actually becoming stronger.