Hello Herbert/list, These patches implement the 'Arbitrary Block Length' blockcipher mode as proposed by John Viega and David McGrew in http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1619/email/rtf00000.rtf (October 28, 2004) and http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1619/email/pdf00005.pdf (April 15, 2004). The spec is unreviewed. Are there cryptologists on this list who are willing to review the security proof of ABL in the April 15th paper and my implementations (both this one and the "independent" implementation at http://cube.dyndns.org/~rsnel/abl/). ABL is the only patent-unencumbered wide block cipher mode that I know. It can encrypt whole 512 byte sectors as whole blocks, this means that if one bit in the unencrypted sector, it changes the corresponding cipherblock completely. It can also operate on 4k blocks (or larger), this is useful for deniable harddisk encryption. (it means all in-filesystem-block modifications look like total block modifications). (operation on 4k block through dm-crypt requires a patch which will be sent seperately) I have emailed the authors, David McGrew confirmed that ABL is unencumbered by patents (as far as he and John Viega know). David had no test vectors. John might have some, but he hasn't responed yet. Unfortunately the SISWG (http://siswg.org/) seems to be uninterested in making ABL a standard because another contender (XCF) is faster. XCF is however patented by Cisco. Greetings, Rik. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-crypto" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
