[Sushi]

"The Story of Alice and Bob"
http://www.johngordonsweb.co.uk/concept/alicebob.html

Should be appreciated by anyone who's ever taken a course or read a book on computer security & cryptography. My favorite excerpt below:

Since it is difficult to design a good cipher, and since the apparatus is very expensive, a lot of work has been done recently to try to standardise on them. Even as I speak the International Standards Organization is meeting to decide on this very issue. Since there is a lot of confusion on this point I have been asked to make the position clear. The purpose of language is to convey information. This only works if both sender and receiver of information both use the same system. In other words language only works precisely because it is standardised.

The purpose of cryptography on the other hand is to make the message unintelligible except to one person. In other words cryptography only works precisely because it is NOT standardised.

So what they do is to make most of the cipher standardised, and to concentrate the non-standardization into one part called the key.

So far so good. But of course the key, the non-standardised part, must be nonstandard in only standardised ways. And also key management must conform to certain standards. In other words standards are being formulated whereby the nonstandard parts, which must conform to certain standards of non-standardization are also to be handled only in a standardised nonstandard way in order to standardise on the overall non-standardization.

I hope this makes the position clear.

[Flipside]

LOL This is why I skipped all the encryption questions on my Networking Protocols and Architecture course

That and the fact I hate doing Binary CRC's by hand.

[Rick James]

In other words standards are being formulated whereby the nonstandard parts, which must conform to certain standards of non-standardization are also to be handled only in a standardised nonstandard way in order to standardise on the overall non-standardization.

My eyes are crossing.