Re:Cybersecurity Humble Book Bundle
by ahazred8ta on Monday July 17, 2017 @11:45PM
(#14794142)
Thomas H. Ptacek (Ptáček) wrote a 2015 update to 'Cryptographic Right Answers'.
https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad#ptacek-Cry...
Maybe kind of akin to
http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html
but for constructions, and with more citations?
Cool, yeah that's a good resource. But it's a bit opinionated and focuses on general purpose hashing functions without coverage of symmetric and asymmetric encryption, digital signatures or password hashing functions. It also doesn't include some obvious contenders, like BLAKE2 (presumably because Keccak won the SHA-3 contest, but that's not a great reason). Other than that, a git repository format also has the handy benefit of pull requests in case one maintainer misses some new avant-garde attack.
While we're at it, a similar resource for benchmarking instead of cryptanalysis exists here: https://bench.cr.yp.to/. This is maintained by Daniel Bernstein, who is probably the single most qualified person to lead that sort of work.
On the one hand it's rather straightforward because much of the state of the art in crypto research is in eprint or open access. On the other hand there isn't really a sane "landscape document" that elucidates all of this information in one place because it's so scattered and hard to organize.
Specifically: imagine a straightforward document with a handy table of contents that e.g. explains what a given cryptographic primitive is at a high level and what the current state of the art in attacking it is, like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Cryptanalysis_and_valida...
I don't know how useful this would be to someone not working on cryptography research because it's heavily descriptive and academic (unlike, say, Cryptographic Right Answers, which is a good prescriptive document for developers).