In cryptography, the S-1 block cipher was a block cipher posted in source code form on Usenet on 11 August 1995. Although incorrect security markings immediately indicated a hoax, there were several features of the code which suggested it might be leaked source code for the Skipjack encryption algorithm, which was still classified at the time.
However once David Wagner had discovered a severe design flaw, it was generally accepted as being a hoax - but one with an astonishing amount of work behind it. When Skipjack was eventually declassified in 1998, it was indeed found to be totally unlike S-1.
Famous quotes containing the words block and/or cipher:
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)