Love cryptopals beyond my ability to articulate it well enough. This is monumental work many engineers owe their “cryptography 101-404” education to.
For a long while company I work for used Cryptopals as means to train/qualify interns before letting them touch serious practical stuff.
Not that knowing answers is a problem (there were public solutions, albeit clunky, before), but such careful explanation almost eliminates the fun in solving to some extent.
Gotta come up with our own take w/o public tour now, is anyone aware of any similar sets of challenges? CryptoHack is ok, but fairly deterministic one that removes “oh where do I go now” feeling, which is essential to bear with to learn to love the craft.
We talk about it all the time. For a little while I was playing with a set on fundamental block cipher cryptanalysis (Matsui, differential, etc) but I put it down. When we interview people for the podcast, I'm going to start asking them for suggestions for new challenges; for instance, I'd love to see if there's dumb lattice crypto bugs we can capture.
This is what I've been waiting for for many years. I did these before answers could be found, and there's a few places I had "working" answers but wasn't happy with the maths and wished I could discuss it.
Just a few months ago a padding Oracle exploit was found against Microsoft exchange. There's a immense attack surface still out there for people who do these challenges.
For a long while company I work for used Cryptopals as means to train/qualify interns before letting them touch serious practical stuff.
Not that knowing answers is a problem (there were public solutions, albeit clunky, before), but such careful explanation almost eliminates the fun in solving to some extent.
Gotta come up with our own take w/o public tour now, is anyone aware of any similar sets of challenges? CryptoHack is ok, but fairly deterministic one that removes “oh where do I go now” feeling, which is essential to bear with to learn to love the craft.
Edits: typos.