Cryptography has been an important activity for centuries, and is gaining importance in today's world of computer networks where you need to confirm that the fellow along the wire is who he says, and that you can exchange (possibly commercial) data without risk of eavesdropping or tampering. Modern cryptography uses computers and has potential to secure our networks, banks and just private information. If it is to fulfill this potential it must become widely used, must be correctly designed and implemented (there are many pitfalls) and outside bodies such as governments must be excluded from having a spare key for everybody. This last point affects an ongoing political controversy where several governments have plans to restrict crypto to forms where they get the keys, thereby removing most of its value.
Links likely to be of interest......
Bert-Jaap Koops' law survey (broken link)
John Young's large collection of technical and politicl documents
mathematical crypto expert Ron Rivest
crypto expert, and debunker of bad crypto plans, Ross Anderson
Recent work on economics and security work affecting monopolies
and pricing is interesting.
If you've a MS WINDOWS ONLY crypto product you can keep it to yourself. Nobody I respect runs MS Windows. (I say this in reply to a message that I might be interested in a certain product.)
Counterpane, the company of Bruce Schneier (Author)
Adam Back's more cypherpunkish approach to crypto
Anonymity - a form of privacy.
ssh or secsh (replacement for rlogin etc)
CFS - cryptographic filesystem
Fixed Big Number arithmetic in C
List of crypto archives worldwide
List of US export notices for the January 2000 regulations
announcements to the USG and export notice list
Books likely to be of interest:
Applied Cryptography, 1995, Bruce Schneier
The Codebreakers, 1996, David Kahn
PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, 1995, Simson Garfinkel
Security Engineering
Practical Cryptography
SSL and TLS, 2001, Rescorla
MD5 - Anne and Lynn Wheeler have provided a list of Internet RFCs that reference MD5 at: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm.
Email (with a blank Subject: field) to arcbot notatla.org.uk
can be used to search and fetch archived mail about crypto from the
cryptography list run by Perry Metzger, and the (defunct) coderpunks list
once run by John Gilmore.
December 2004 - there is a GCHQ crypto puzzle.
GCHQ announcement - December 2004
GCHQ announcement - updated periodically
Some work I've done on the puzzle:
GCHQ puzzle - partial method and solution