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@stf@chaos.social
2025-11-26 17:06:26

by accident i stumbled on this review by the #NSA on Bruce Schneiers "Applied Crypto" book from long ago.

9. BOOK REVIEW: APPLIED CRYPTOGRAPHY [censored] Reviewer

Applied Cryptography, for those who don't read the internet news, is a
book written by Bruce Schneier last year. According to the jacket,
Schneier is a data security expert with a master's degree in computer
science. According to his followers, he is a hero who has finally
brought together the loose threads of cryptography for the general
public to understand. Schneier has gathered academic research, internet
gossip, and everything he co…

Issue 1 TALES OF THE KRYPT Page 14 of 16
oc ID: 6823780

Playing loose with the facts is a serious problem with Schneier. For
example in discussing a small-exponent attack on RSA, he says "an
attack by Michael Wiener will recover e when e is up to one quarter the
size of n." Actually, Wiener's attack recovers the secret exponent d
when e has less than one quarter as many bits as n, which is a quite
different statement. Or: "The quadratic sieve is the fastest known .
algorithm for factoring numb…