Re: amateur ciphers

[solman@MIT.EDU]

> 
> an118@vox.hacktic.nl says:
> > I saw an interesting post in sci.crypt last week about a particular cypher.
> > I think it ws called "The Penknife Cypher" or something along those lines.
> > I guess I have been so PGP oriented that i've sort of stuck my head in the
> > sand and ignored other possibilities regarding encryption.
> > 
> > ARE there any other good cypher's out there, suitable for e-mail usage?
> 
> The only really reasonable symmetric key ciphers out there in
> publically described form these days are DES, 3-DES and IDEA. There
> are a couple of things that may be okay, but which aren't out in the
> public literature (RC2 and RC4), a couple of things that are likely
> okay but which we are REALLY not going to find anything out about for
> a while (Skipjack :-) and a couple of things that are promising (like
> Coppersmith's new SEAL stream cipher, which looks quite interesting
> indeed.)

What about MDC and Luby-Rackoff (spelling?). I mean sure, they haven't been
subjected to much scrutiny, but they appear to be as strong as their
underlying one-way hashes. I think that their blazing speed merits giving
them serious consideration. Besides, weren't people calling IDEA pretty
secure when it had been subjected to as much analysis as LR and MDC have
been subjected to thus far?

JWS