On Thu, 7 Mar 1996 JonWienke@aol.com wrote:

...

Teledyne (TET) is out marketing a "new" crypto system as a competitor against DES and what TET calls "linear" cryptosystems. They are claiming a non-linear approach in which (as best I can tell) they are permuting the s-boxes and using 4 bit/16 entry substitution tables.

Dont trust it unless you are a good cryptanalyst and have a copy of the source code. Most commercial crypto products are crap.

You'd be surprised how many of them are doing the "message XOR key" stuff that so many of us wrote when were, as Roy Scheider put it in 'Blue Thunder', "young and stupid". Also, S-boxes are a fancy way of getting yourself into a lot of trouble while promoting a false sense of security - they are *very* hard to get right, and it takes a lot of work to prove that you haven't introduced a weakness with the "improvement". See "S-Box Design" in Schneier's book, page 349 for a good intro to designing such. -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com 214/993-3935 voicemail/digital pager 800/558-3408 SkyPager Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744@anon.penet.fi "Past the wounds of childhood, past the fallen dreams and the broken families, through the hurt and the loss and the agony only the night ever hears, is a waiting soul. Patient, permanent, abundant, it opens its infinite heart and asks only one thing of you ... 'Remember who it is you really are.'" -- "Losing Your Mind", Karen Alexander and Rick Boyes The mark of a good conspiracy theory is its untestability. -- Andrew Spring