News: Cipher Breaking Prize

LShift developer wins cipher-breaking prize.

LShift senior developer Paul Crowley has won a $1000 prize from UIC professor Daniel J Bernstein for his paper, "Truncated differential cryptanalysis of five rounds of Salsa20".

Salsa20 is a new cipher designed by Bernstein. To encourage others to analyse its strengths and weaknesses he pledged a $1000 prize to the analysis that he found most interesting by the end of 2005. The winning paper does not show that the whole cipher is weak, but breaks a reduced version of the cipher.

Paul only got into cryptography for the girls. :)

The cipher and prize: http://cr.yp.to/snuffle.html#prizes

The paper: http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/papersdir/073.pdf (59K).