Smalltalk & Cryptography
Start with a quick overview of cryptography
techniques (one-time pad, symmetric/asymmetric
keys)
Then, among the key-based
techniques, some talk about stream vs. block-based
techniques.
The presentation was
supposed to be about cryptographic support within VisualWorks, but the coolest
(and most effective) thing about it was that the presenter (Martin Kobetic) had
gone through the trouble of assembling his slides in some software for VW that
resembled book morphs in Squeak. Because his presentation was running in a live
image, he was able to demonstrate some of the points he was making by running
do-its.
This in itself is no big deal
(who cares about seeing a string become a random byte array?), but when he was
demoing the danger of reusing keys in a symmetric key system (RSA?), he ran the
encoding on a clipped region of pixels within his presentation, then ran the
same process (same key) on another clipped region, then overlayed the two
regions, finally resulting in what was recognizable as the two clipped regions
overlayed on one another.
(A xor: k)
& (B xor: k) = A & B.
You had
to be here, I guess. It was very effective. I think it was George Heeg who said
that it was the best presentation demonstrating different cryptography
techniques that he had ever seen, and I have to agree.
Posted: Mon - May 3, 2004 at 10:31 AM