Cryptanalysis

I'm trying to learn cryptanalysis methods for various ciphers and I could use some tools to help me with that...

I've already tried crank (not good, only pen+paper ciphers) and cryptool (interesting, but buggy and...seems to be a toy)..

Any suggestions?

yes, the best place for looking for...things of all sorts, is to try looking in google.com or searching the AO forums. you could find somethings on download.com and maybe if your desperate enough try kazaa. this would be where you can get the tools

unfortuantely, i cant tell you what tools you should get because that isnt my area :D

good hunting

here is a new encryption method explained...
http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=240736

l0l, j/k

i've used a little tool called john the ripper which will crack most anything. I've been able to use it to recover some passwords on a linux system. Took 2 weeks, but i got it ahh.. the power of dual processor!!..

Yeah, I know about john the ripper, but that is definetly not cryptanalysis, but mere bruteforcing... I'm looking for more delicate ways to do it... But don't get me wrong, don't think that I have here an uncrackable file with passwords or something that I want to crack... No, I just want to learn about this thing...

cryptanalysis is difficult to learn for a newbie not doing graduate level research in cryptography. this is mainly because there are no good sources outside of research conferences. besides google, another good search engine for research papers is:

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs

here is a site i found while doing my undergraduate thesis work. this guy has all sorts of links about cryptography and cryptanalysis. you can search his page for even more.

http://www.tcs.hut.fi/~helger/crypto...tanalysis.html

some recommendations. cryptanalysis is not for the meek. you must first learn linear algebra (proofs and matrices), abstract algebra (group theory, number theory, ring theory, field theory), and various other math from different areas like statistics and whatnot.

also, you will occasionally find links and discussions on current cryptanalysis work in the Counterpane cryptogram.

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram.html

good luck

Linear algebra and groups and stuff I studied in my first year (Computer Science) but... you don't want to know how good I am :PP

Heres a good link, havent read it all yet but the first couple of chapters seem promising, http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/...class/lessons/

One of the best books about crypto is Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier. It's expensive but it will give you all the details about cryptography and analysis.