Re: Thank you all for the constructive comments

Peter van Liesdonk wrote:
This is not meant directly to you, but in a more general way: I think
it is fair to expect people know steps B-Y when they want to reach Z.
Otherwise you should not aim at Z, but at C.

Personally I wouldn't aspire to obtain some pre-defined goal known as
Z. Maybe Z' or something other. Who wants to aspire to achieve what
others have already achieved as their final goal?

It sounds silly to say it about your own science, but cryptography is
definitely not an easy science.

Like any field of study there are a multitude levels of understanding.
I think most adults have a basic understanding of chemistry and
medicine (e.g. drink water when you have a headache, too much
dierhetics and you get dried out, etc) but that's leagues away from
saying you're a doctor.

Cryptography is no different. You can understand that AES "encrypts" a
block of text, without really knowing how it does it, or why it was
designed the way it was.

For the OP to understand chaining modes all you need to do is look at
cryptography as a blackbox. At that level, understanding isn't like
going from A to Z but from A to B.

Most people accept they cannot do rocket science or quantum mechanics
when they have only read a few books. But it surprises me every time
that in this newsgroup people do expect that they can immediately do
difficult crypto when they read a few articles or books. It takes years
of research and work to become anywhere near decent. I have been
working in this area for 5 years full-time now and still learn new
things from the posts in this group.

Crypto, physics and math fall under the hollywood notion of "spook"
which is why they attract the most amount of trolls. Everyone who's
seen an episode of star trek or the movie Swordfish (or Mercury Rising
or about a dozen others) thinks they can quantum encrypt the storage
matrix, or whatever.

Dispelling that notion is often hard, especially when the poster is not
seriously interested in learning the subject.

For this I am called a troll.
Personally, I don't see you as a troll. I can see you are genuinely
interested. But sometimes it would be easier if you aimed at the C, or

The OP was given numerous chances to change their behaviour and study
habits. Each time with marked failure. To me that's a troll because
at the end of the day, they'll never actually learn anything and just
suck the time/energy out of all the participants.

Labeling the OP a troll and avoiding them like the plague is about the
only way to deal with characters like that. If they want to redeem
themselves they should actually pick up a book or two and read them.
And stop being so arrogant as to assume that their cursory glance of
cryptography is enough to make them an expert.

Then again, these days there seem to be more posts about what people
should and should not ask in this newsgroup than that there are posts
about actual crypto. If you don't want to help a person, please just
don't answer.

What if you tried to help the OP and now just want to help others by
telling them to avoid them?

I find the documents from the
obscure people easier to read because they are less mathematical in their
descriptions of various methods and modes
Yeah, I noticed that too. There is a huge difference in writing
qualities. Maybe that is because the really brilliant minds (that
publish often) need less steps to understand something, so don't bother
mentioning them; while lesser minds need every step for comprehension
and repeat every step when explaining.

That's usually a product of politics. The whole "publish or perish"
mentality drives some students/grads to publish an excessive amount of
non-original work in various guises.

That being said, the OP needs to learn the basics of cryptography
first, such as the vernacular and the various types of primitives. If
the OP is sitting down reading Goldreich right now, they're sadly
mistaken and should go back to the bookstore.

To the OP: Nobody wants to hold people back or to artificially limit
them. Stop taking everything as an adversarial stance and note that,
hey maybe some of us are older than you and have gone through the same
stuff you are going through now in your development. We're not out to
get you, drop the persecution complex, read a few introductory texts
and feel free to ask questions.

Tom

.

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