"Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men" (Pythagoras)
In this blog-post, I build off the previous ideas introduced in the AES article in order to describe low-latency lightweight ciphers.
Unlike the previous blog-post, however, there is much less background mathematics required in order to understand what is going on (however, I do use the symbol for Galois fields once or twice).
In this blog-post I give an in-depth explanation of DES's successor and NIST's current endorsed cipher.
Before diving into the cipher, I'll try my best to introduce cryptography basics so that the average reader can understand what is going on. However, I also go over Galois field arithmetic in the additional content for anyone interested in why AES works.
My name is Chris and I'm a mathematics Ph.D. student at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) studying Algebraic Geometry with a focus towards stability conditions (as occuring in String theory, etc).
Prior to my focus on pure mathematics, I completed my masters in applied computational topology, which itself was a bit of an abstraction from my undergrad in computer science engineering. Oddly enough, it all started with my love of Latin and classical Greek — but that's getting a bit off track.
Nowadays I spend the majority of my free time either woodworking like my father, or downhill / slalom longboarding (see homepage video). If you're ever in the central California area for the latter, give me a hollar. Thanks for visiting!